Could be a potential GOP ticket there, Cruz-Hawley 2024 or 2028 to carry on Trump's mantle.
Unlikely to win the general but could win the base
If Cruz got it, he'd deliberately balance the ticket with his VP choice,so not Hawley. Remember, he did choose a VP in 2016 - Carly Fiorini, who was very much designed to reach out.
Cruz is sufficiently clever to be dangerous.
They are both clever. Cruz went to Princeton and Harvard law school where he graduated magna cum laude.
Hawley went to Stanford where he graduated with high honours in History and then went to Yale law school.
They are very, very rightwing but also very intelligent, far more intelligent than Trump is or indeed Biden is for that matter
Clearly not enough to know which way the wind blows.
Or even to distinguish between right and wrong.
Well yes. However, that is perhaps a desirable rather than essential quality in an aspiring politician.
If stopped en route to work, I will calmly explain that I cannot work from home. That is perfectly allowed within the law. It shouldn't go any further than that.
The onus would be on the police to prove that I am not in fact en route to work. Otherwise we're not far off 'ihre papier, bitte'
There was a time when Conservatives supported the idea of identity cards.
Of course the Police should also follow the rules and police them fairly and sensibly
Outrageous.
If I was walking with one other person, by a reservoir, say, in Derbyshire, with a coffee (all perfectly legal) and told to return home, I would refuse. Because we don't live in a police state.
In my area all fines issued are reviewed by the police commissioners office.
As for outrageous, I criticise the police overstepping their bounds plenty, and they will no doubt fine people not in breach of the law by mistake, but they are trying to carry out the law so I wouldn't blame them for the outrageousness of the law.
The police are not legally entitled to do this. If you are out taking exercise, there is no limit in the rules on the amount of time you are allowed to be out. Simply sitting down on a park bench in the middle of your exercise does not put you in breach.
I did just that before embarking on a short hill climb this afternoon, as I had got a bit breathless (I know, I need to get fitter) but if some officious policeman had ordered me to leave I'm sure I'd have had enough breath to give him a lesson on the law.
Be careful from my experience pointing out what the law actually says to a police officer can be construed as causing a breach of the peace in some of their minds
I have a fair amount of experience dealing with the police. But thanks.
There is experience of dealing with the police, and experience of dealing with the police however. Dealing with them from a position of being someone that investigates people I dare say has a different experience than someone who regularly used to get swept up by the police for not being the right person in the right place
I would suggest that there are two or three things we need to do to help.
Firstly, as a society, we need to make sure we add sufficient value to pay our way. At the moment we don't. We need to boost productivity, investment, skills, innovation and creativity. This pays the bills.
Secondly, we need to be clear that that surplus is not just for the talented few who make it but requires to be distributed through society. This means higher taxes although the mobility of those on high earnings is an issue.
Thirdly, we have to accept that a lot of jobs have to be subsidised. Of course we do a fair bit of that already through WFTC and the like (which would no doubt help the Simpsons if the US had something similar). We do a lot of this already of course but we moan about it rather a lot. We are going to have to do more.
Fourthly, I think we need to be a bit more practical about what we teach even our less able citizens. We need to focus on things that are going to make them employable in this ever more competitive world. So they need to learn maths, computing, data processing, engineering, joinery, electronics, skills that are much more focused on jobs. We need to stop spending so much on social sciences, the arts, and many of the other subjects taught at school and university, except for the elite who can make it in these areas. On one view we need to stop being so self indulgent.
The arts are one sector where arguably Britain has a competitive advantage and much to offer. I'm not thinking just of the famous artists but all the many skills and trades that go into it. Silly to throw that away.
Arguably a lot of data processing, engineering and computing jobs will be done by robots. Train people for those sorts of jobs and it might end up being the equivalent of training people to work in Manchester mills just as those industries were moving to the Third World.
Agree with your general points though. I think we also need to be a lot less snobbish about some jobs. The key workers this last year have been people doing jobs that in other times a lot of people have disregarded and underpaid and have not wanted for their own children.
I agree at the elite end the arts are a significant money maker for the UK but, to take an example, my niece did a degree in stage management. She is now quite a successful manager in Tesco's but she freely admits that she got nothing out of her degree other than quite a lot of fun. There is a very long and unproductive tail to the likes of the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts.
Of course the Police should also follow the rules and police them fairly and sensibly
Outrageous.
If I was walking with one other person, by a reservoir, say, in Derbyshire, with a coffee (all perfectly legal) and told to return home, I would refuse. Because we don't live in a police state.
In my area all fines issued are reviewed by the police commissioners office.
As for outrageous, I criticise the police overstepping their bounds plenty, and they will no doubt fine people not in breach of the law by mistake, but they are trying to carry out the law so I wouldn't blame them for the outrageousness of the law.
The police are not legally entitled to do this. If you are out taking exercise, there is no limit in the rules on the amount of time you are allowed to be out. Simply sitting down on a park bench in the middle of your exercise does not put you in breach.
I did just that before embarking on a short hill climb this afternoon, as I had got a bit breathless (I know, I need to get fitter) but if some officious policeman had ordered me to leave I'm sure I'd have had enough breath to give him a lesson on the law.
Be careful from my experience pointing out what the law actually says to a police officer can be construed as causing a breach of the peace in some of their minds
I have a fair amount of experience dealing with the police. But thanks.
I pity the poor bloody cop who wrongfully crosses Ms Cyclefree!
If stopped en route to work, I will calmly explain that I cannot work from home. That is perfectly allowed within the law. It shouldn't go any further than that.
The onus would be on the police to prove that I am not in fact en route to work. Otherwise we're not far off 'ihre papier, bitte'
There was a time when Conservatives supported the idea of identity cards.
If stopped en route to work, I will calmly explain that I cannot work from home. That is perfectly allowed within the law. It shouldn't go any further than that.
The onus would be on the police to prove that I am not in fact en route to work. Otherwise we're not far off 'ihre papier, bitte'
There was a time when Conservatives supported the idea of identity cards.
Really? I remember it being a fulfilled promise to scrap them.
Of course the Police should also follow the rules and police them fairly and sensibly
Outrageous.
If I was walking with one other person, by a reservoir, say, in Derbyshire, with a coffee (all perfectly legal) and told to return home, I would refuse. Because we don't live in a police state.
In my area all fines issued are reviewed by the police commissioners office.
Police shouldn't be handing out fines to people who don't break the law.
I can't believe I am having to write that.
I don't disagree and the police do overstep the law and when that happens it is a disgrace - I've criticised that on many occasions, not least when the guidance does not match the law - but the headline says where they believe people to be in 'breach of the rules', so the implication was where someone appeared to be in breach of the law. Therefore the outrageousness would be the law, not the police action
What law would this be exactly?
I really think people are missing my point and I don't understand why. Some people appear to be objecting to the very principle of the police issuing fines at all, when we know that people are indeed fined for Covid-19 breaches legitimately. I'm saying that having a problem with the police for that is looking in the wrong place.
The police wrongly issuing fines is absolutely their fault, which is why I am glad the fines are reviewed, though they should get it right in the first place.
I don't see what is controversial about that. Parliament has given the police a lot of power, and people can be mad at that, but they have been given it. The police, however, need to utilise that power correctly.
From these responses people seem to be arguing against a non-position that it is ok for them to fine people incorrectly, and no one is suggesing that.
I think that the police should not be allowed to issue fines full stop.
I think the police some of them often overstep their bounds and don't know the law. Ask any photographer for example. This is also a problem and you will find in most forces its the same individuals over and over again.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
Would an average European now seek to emigrate to America, to secure an average American life?
Would anyone eagerly go from Hamburg to Chicago? Oslo to Ohio? Dublin to Kansas? Lisbon to Detroit? Even from Athens Greece to Athens Georgia?
I don't think so. Outside a top, super-affluent decile of bankers going to NYC, hedge funders to Connecticut, actors to LA, geniuses to Silicon Valley, America is now a less attractive place to live than Europe, and, increasingly, much of Asia.
By going to America you are emigrating to an inferior health system, fewer holidays, worse crime, more guns, a mad political system, and terrible food. The American dream is dead.
For us. It is still immensely attractive to places like central America, Mexico and the Philippines.
Indeed, Which is part of America's problem. It now attracts people from Africa, and LatAm, that many Americans, I fear, would rather not have as immigrants, and the enriching flow of mass immigration from more sophisticated societies has largely stopped.
The many Americans who "fear" Latino & African immigrants, are either racists or idiots. Certainly these newcomers are every bit as "enriching" as the Euro peasants who preceded them from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe.
One way that American is different from Western Europe (including obscure off-shore islands) is that, within a generation, immigrants to our shore become . . . Americans.
E pluribus unum!
BTW, one of the more popular leaders of the NBA these days is Athens, Greece native Giannis Antetokounmpo.
I would suggest that there are two or three things we need to do to help.
Firstly, as a society, we need to make sure we add sufficient value to pay our way. At the moment we don't. We need to boost productivity, investment, skills, innovation and creativity. This pays the bills.
Secondly, we need to be clear that that surplus is not just for the talented few who make it but requires to be distributed through society. This means higher taxes although the mobility of those on high earnings is an issue.
Thirdly, we have to accept that a lot of jobs have to be subsidised. Of course we do a fair bit of that already through WFTC and the like (which would no doubt help the Simpsons if the US had something similar). We do a lot of this already of course but we moan about it rather a lot. We are going to have to do more.
Fourthly, I think we need to be a bit more practical about what we teach even our less able citizens. We need to focus on things that are going to make them employable in this ever more competitive world. So they need to learn maths, computing, data processing, engineering, joinery, electronics, skills that are much more focused on jobs. We need to stop spending so much on social sciences, the arts, and many of the other subjects taught at school and university, except for the elite who can make it in these areas. On one view we need to stop being so self indulgent.
The arts are one sector where arguably Britain has a competitive advantage and much to offer. I'm not thinking just of the famous artists but all the many skills and trades that go into it. Silly to throw that away.
Arguably a lot of data processing, engineering and computing jobs will be done by robots. Train people for those sorts of jobs and it might end up being the equivalent of training people to work in Manchester mills just as those industries were moving to the Third World.
Agree with your general points though. I think we also need to be a lot less snobbish about some jobs. The key workers this last year have been people doing jobs that in other times a lot of people have disregarded and underpaid and have not wanted for their own children.
I agree at the elite end the arts are a significant money maker for the UK but, to take an example, my niece did a degree in stage management. She is now quite a successful manager in Tesco's but she freely admits that she got nothing out of her degree other than quite a lot of fun. There is a very long and unproductive tail to the likes of the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts.
I would suggest that there are two or three things we need to do to help.
Firstly, as a society, we need to make sure we add sufficient value to pay our way. At the moment we don't. We need to boost productivity, investment, skills, innovation and creativity. This pays the bills.
Secondly, we need to be clear that that surplus is not just for the talented few who make it but requires to be distributed through society. This means higher taxes although the mobility of those on high earnings is an issue.
Thirdly, we have to accept that a lot of jobs have to be subsidised. Of course we do a fair bit of that already through WFTC and the like (which would no doubt help the Simpsons if the US had something similar). We do a lot of this already of course but we moan about it rather a lot. We are going to have to do more.
Fourthly, I think we need to be a bit more practical about what we teach even our less able citizens. We need to focus on things that are going to make them employable in this ever more competitive world. So they need to learn maths, computing, data processing, engineering, joinery, electronics, skills that are much more focused on jobs. We need to stop spending so much on social sciences, the arts, and many of the other subjects taught at school and university, except for the elite who can make it in these areas. On one view we need to stop being so self indulgent.
The arts are one sector where arguably Britain has a competitive advantage and much to offer. I'm not thinking just of the famous artists but all the many skills and trades that go into it. Silly to throw that away.
Arguably a lot of data processing, engineering and computing jobs will be done by robots. Train people for those sorts of jobs and it might end up being the equivalent of training people to work in Manchester mills just as those industries were moving to the Third World.
Agree with your general points though. I think we also need to be a lot less snobbish about some jobs. The key workers this last year have been people doing jobs that in other times a lot of people have disregarded and underpaid and have not wanted for their own children.
I agree at the elite end the arts are a significant money maker for the UK but, to take an example, my niece did a degree in stage management. She is now quite a successful manager in Tesco's but she freely admits that she got nothing out of her degree other than quite a lot of fun. There is a very long and unproductive tail to the likes of the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts.
Of course the Police should also follow the rules and police them fairly and sensibly
Outrageous.
If I was walking with one other person, by a reservoir, say, in Derbyshire, with a coffee (all perfectly legal) and told to return home, I would refuse. Because we don't live in a police state.
In my area all fines issued are reviewed by the police commissioners office.
Police shouldn't be handing out fines to people who don't break the law.
I can't believe I am having to write that.
I don't disagree and the police do overstep the law and when that happens it is a disgrace - I've criticised that on many occasions, not least when the guidance does not match the law - but the headline says where they believe people to be in 'breach of the rules', so the implication was where someone appeared to be in breach of the law. Therefore the outrageousness would be the law, not the police action
What law would this be exactly?
I really think people are missing my point and I don't understand why. Some people appear to be objecting to the very principle of the police issuing fines at all, when we know that people are indeed fined for Covid-19 breaches legitimately. I'm saying that having a problem with the police for that is looking in the wrong place.
The police wrongly issuing fines is absolutely their fault, which is why I am glad the fines are reviewed, though they should get it right in the first place.
I don't see what is controversial about that. Parliament has given the police a lot of power, and people can be mad at that, but they have been given it. The police, however, need to utilise that power correctly.
From these responses people seem to be arguing against a non-position that it is ok for them to fine people incorrectly, and no one is suggesing that.
I think that the police should not be allowed to issue fines full stop.
I think the police some of them often overstep their bounds and don't know the law. Ask any photographer for example. This is also a problem and you will find in most forces its the same individuals over and over again.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
Would an average European now seek to emigrate to America, to secure an average American life?
Would anyone eagerly go from Hamburg to Chicago? Oslo to Ohio? Dublin to Kansas? Lisbon to Detroit? Even from Athens Greece to Athens Georgia?
I don't think so. Outside a top, super-affluent decile of bankers going to NYC, hedge funders to Connecticut, actors to LA, geniuses to Silicon Valley, America is now a less attractive place to live than Europe, and, increasingly, much of Asia.
By going to America you are emigrating to an inferior health system, fewer holidays, worse crime, more guns, a mad political system, and terrible food. The American dream is dead.
For us. It is still immensely attractive to places like central America, Mexico and the Philippines.
Plenty of shit jobs in the UK are really, really attractive to people from overseas.
For those with a good sense of humour, the discovery that Polish people were signing up to the new Northern Ireland Police Service in noticeable numbers was a blessing.
Sein Fein had successfully argued, previously, that non-catholic, non-protestants should be counted as protestants for the 50-50 quota thing.
So you have Protestant Hindus, Protestant Muslims, and Protestant Atheists in the PSNI.
The problem with the Polish types was that they weren't locals. Even though, they were pretty much all Catholics.....
So, after some discussion, they were counted in the Protestant quota.
So, in Northern Ireland, we have Protestant Catholics.
Would make more sense IF they were Czech Catholics!
Read something once while back, about a Jewish kid who grew up in Belfast (one of the leafier bits) who was accosted on the street one fine day and asked, are you Catholic or Protestant.
I'm a Jew, he replied
Ok, then, was the rather puzzled response, are yez a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?
Thinking quickly, and taking what he could surmise about his questioners, he swallowed hard and answered, I'm a Protestant Jew.
Which fortunately for him proved to be he right answer.
I remember Tony Curtis describing his childhood as a Jew in the Bronx. He said the area was mostly Irish Catholic and one Sunday a friend invited him to come to Mass. 'Don't worry he said just do what I do' As he waited to get communion someone in the line turned to him and said " Have you farted?' 'No' he said 'Am I supposed to?'
If stopped en route to work, I will calmly explain that I cannot work from home. That is perfectly allowed within the law. It shouldn't go any further than that.
The onus would be on the police to prove that I am not in fact en route to work. Otherwise we're not far off 'ihre papier, bitte'
There was a time when Conservatives supported the idea of identity cards.
Of course the Police should also follow the rules and police them fairly and sensibly
Outrageous.
If I was walking with one other person, by a reservoir, say, in Derbyshire, with a coffee (all perfectly legal) and told to return home, I would refuse. Because we don't live in a police state.
In my area all fines issued are reviewed by the police commissioners office.
Police shouldn't be handing out fines to people who don't break the law.
I can't believe I am having to write that.
I don't disagree and the police do overstep the law and when that happens it is a disgrace - I've criticised that on many occasions, not least when the guidance does not match the law - but the headline says where they believe people to be in 'breach of the rules', so the implication was where someone appeared to be in breach of the law. Therefore the outrageousness would be the law, not the police action
What law would this be exactly?
I really think people are missing my point and I don't understand why. Some people appear to be objecting to the very principle of the police issuing fines at all, when we know that people are indeed fined for Covid-19 breaches legitimately. I'm saying that having a problem with the police for that is looking in the wrong place.
The police wrongly issuing fines is absolutely their fault, which is why I am glad the fines are reviewed, though they should get it right in the first place.
I don't see what is controversial about that. Parliament has given the police a lot of power, and people can be mad at that, but they have been given it. The police, however, need to utilise that power correctly.
From these responses people seem to be arguing against a non-position that it is ok for them to fine people incorrectly, and no one is suggesing that.
I think you've been missing my point from the start. Going back to the original headline:
Every police officer has been told to fine people £200 if they believe they are in breach of the rules
The police should NOT be issuing any fines UNLESS they have clear evidence of a LAW being broken.
Not a 'rule' or a guideline breeched. A law. The Covid laws are very specific. 2m, for example, is not in law.
They should also have to do more than 'believe' - they should have prima facie evidence. In most cases that will be witnessing breaches of the law. I don't object to them issuing fines for law breakers.
And the review process doesn't negate incorrect imposition of fines. If police are acting on 'beliefs' and 'rules' rather than 'evidence' and 'laws' the rule of law in this country has broken down, and the sacred trust that is policing by consent absolutely violated.
By the way, there's a really interesting question that's kind of hidden.
Are there any developed, first world, countries that have maintained near full employment and managed to avoid blown out inequality in the last 20 years?
And the answer is yes, there are quite a few.
Best of all, they share some fairly similar policies, albeit none that are being promoted by either the Democrats or the Republicans.
The most obvious country is Switzerland.
It has incredibly onerous environmental legislation, a really expensive currency, and free trade agreements with all, including China.
It also has a thriving domestic manufacturing sector, from consumer goods all the way through to high tech. And full employment.
Indeed, if you were to look at Swiss policy, you would assume it would be getting massacred by China, Eastern Europe, etc., when it's actually thriving.
Why?
Because Switzerland has a fabulous educational system that emphasises vocational learning for those not going to higher education. (All the first would countries that have done well have really good vocational training - see Singapore, Norway and Germany.)
Switzerland also has high household savings rates: this means that banks profits are based around lending to local businesses, rather than to 25%+ APR credit card customers. (Every other first world country - except Australia that had the mining boom - that's done well also has high household savings rates.)
Are you saying that Switzerland etc do not have the equivalent of London Metropolitan University ?
As to high savings rates they require people to live within their means.
But people prefer to live to the style they think they are deserving of.
And governments encourage them to do so because it makes voters happy and so more likely to re-elect governments.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
Would an average European now seek to emigrate to America, to secure an average American life?
Would anyone eagerly go from Hamburg to Chicago? Oslo to Ohio? Dublin to Kansas? Lisbon to Detroit? Even from Athens Greece to Athens Georgia?
I don't think so. Outside a top, super-affluent decile of bankers going to NYC, hedge funders to Connecticut, actors to LA, geniuses to Silicon Valley, America is now a less attractive place to live than Europe, and, increasingly, much of Asia.
By going to America you are emigrating to an inferior health system, fewer holidays, worse crime, more guns, a mad political system, and terrible food. The American dream is dead.
For us. It is still immensely attractive to places like central America, Mexico and the Philippines.
Plenty of shit jobs in the UK are really, really attractive to people from overseas.
For those with a good sense of humour, the discovery that Polish people were signing up to the new Northern Ireland Police Service in noticeable numbers was a blessing.
Sein Fein had successfully argued, previously, that non-catholic, non-protestants should be counted as protestants for the 50-50 quota thing.
So you have Protestant Hindus, Protestant Muslims, and Protestant Atheists in the PSNI.
The problem with the Polish types was that they weren't locals. Even though, they were pretty much all Catholics.....
So, after some discussion, they were counted in the Protestant quota.
So, in Northern Ireland, we have Protestant Catholics.
Would make more sense IF they were Czech Catholics!
Read something once while back, about a Jewish kid who grew up in Belfast (one of the leafier bits) who was accosted on the street one fine day and asked, are you Catholic or Protestant.
I'm a Jew, he replied
Ok, then, was the rather puzzled response, are yez a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?
Thinking quickly, and taking what he could surmise about his questioners, he swallowed hard and answered, I'm a Protestant Jew.
Which fortunately for him proved to be he right answer.
If stopped en route to work, I will calmly explain that I cannot work from home. That is perfectly allowed within the law. It shouldn't go any further than that.
The onus would be on the police to prove that I am not in fact en route to work. Otherwise we're not far off 'ihre papier, bitte'
There was a time when Conservatives supported the idea of identity cards.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
Would an average European now seek to emigrate to America, to secure an average American life?
Would anyone eagerly go from Hamburg to Chicago? Oslo to Ohio? Dublin to Kansas? Lisbon to Detroit? Even from Athens Greece to Athens Georgia?
I don't think so. Outside a top, super-affluent decile of bankers going to NYC, hedge funders to Connecticut, actors to LA, geniuses to Silicon Valley, America is now a less attractive place to live than Europe, and, increasingly, much of Asia.
By going to America you are emigrating to an inferior health system, fewer holidays, worse crime, more guns, a mad political system, and terrible food. The American dream is dead.
For us. It is still immensely attractive to places like central America, Mexico and the Philippines.
Plenty of shit jobs in the UK are really, really attractive to people from overseas.
For those with a good sense of humour, the discovery that Polish people were signing up to the new Northern Ireland Police Service in noticeable numbers was a blessing.
Sein Fein had successfully argued, previously, that non-catholic, non-protestants should be counted as protestants for the 50-50 quota thing.
So you have Protestant Hindus, Protestant Muslims, and Protestant Atheists in the PSNI.
The problem with the Polish types was that they weren't locals. Even though, they were pretty much all Catholics.....
So, after some discussion, they were counted in the Protestant quota.
So, in Northern Ireland, we have Protestant Catholics.
The Irish have been mad for a long time. Unfortunately we are catching up fast.
I love this kind of madness - more of it please. Bring it!
In case you don't know, there is an old NI joke... the punchline goes
"to be sure, to be sure. But are you a Protestant Hindu or a Catholic Hindu?"
When you are legislating jokes.... well, people stop dying.
In an interview before my wedding in Galway Cathedral 52 years ago, I was asked by the priest whether I was a Catholic. I answered - No I'm an atheist. He answered - Thank goodness. I thought you might be a Protestant.
Of course the Police should also follow the rules and police them fairly and sensibly
Outrageous.
If I was walking with one other person, by a reservoir, say, in Derbyshire, with a coffee (all perfectly legal) and told to return home, I would refuse. Because we don't live in a police state.
In my area all fines issued are reviewed by the police commissioners office.
As for outrageous, I criticise the police overstepping their bounds plenty, and they will no doubt fine people not in breach of the law by mistake, but they are trying to carry out the law so I wouldn't blame them for the outrageousness of the law.
The police are not legally entitled to do this. If you are out taking exercise, there is no limit in the rules on the amount of time you are allowed to be out. Simply sitting down on a park bench in the middle of your exercise does not put you in breach.
I did just that before embarking on a short hill climb this afternoon, as I had got a bit breathless (I know, I need to get fitter) but if some officious policeman had ordered me to leave I'm sure I'd have had enough breath to give him a lesson on the law.
Be careful from my experience pointing out what the law actually says to a police officer can be construed as causing a breach of the peace in some of their minds
I have a fair amount of experience dealing with the police. But thanks.
There is experience of dealing with the police, and experience of dealing with the police however. Dealing with them from a position of being someone that investigates people I dare say has a different experience than someone who regularly used to get swept up by the police for not being the right person in the right place
Oh sure.
I hope I have learnt to be sufficiently feline when dealing with authority figures.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
Would an average European now seek to emigrate to America, to secure an average American life?
Would anyone eagerly go from Hamburg to Chicago? Oslo to Ohio? Dublin to Kansas? Lisbon to Detroit? Even from Athens Greece to Athens Georgia?
I don't think so. Outside a top, super-affluent decile of bankers going to NYC, hedge funders to Connecticut, actors to LA, geniuses to Silicon Valley, America is now a less attractive place to live than Europe, and, increasingly, much of Asia.
By going to America you are emigrating to an inferior health system, fewer holidays, worse crime, more guns, a mad political system, and terrible food. The American dream is dead.
For us. It is still immensely attractive to places like central America, Mexico and the Philippines.
Indeed, Which is part of America's problem. It now attracts people from Africa, and LatAm, that many Americans, I fear, would rather not have as immigrants, and the enriching flow of mass immigration from more sophisticated societies has largely stopped.
The many Americans who "fear" Latino & African immigrants, are either racists or idiots. Certainly these newcomers are every bit as "enriching" as the Euro peasants who preceded them from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe.
One way that American is different from Western Europe (including obscure off-shore islands) is that, within a generation, immigrants to our shore become . . . Americans.
E pluribus unum!
BTW, one of the more popular leaders of the NBA these days is Athens, Greece native Giannis Antetokounmpo.
It is naive to think that white Americans - still the majority of the nation - are just as welcoming of Nigerian, Honduran or Pakistani immigrants as they are of Irish, Norwegian or Japanese immigrants. The change in the make up of American immigration ("build the wall!") was one of the drivers of Trump's initial victory, and is still an explosive topic in American politics.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
Would an average European now seek to emigrate to America, to secure an average American life?
Would anyone eagerly go from Hamburg to Chicago? Oslo to Ohio? Dublin to Kansas? Lisbon to Detroit? Even from Athens Greece to Athens Georgia?
I don't think so. Outside a top, super-affluent decile of bankers going to NYC, hedge funders to Connecticut, actors to LA, geniuses to Silicon Valley, America is now a less attractive place to live than Europe, and, increasingly, much of Asia.
By going to America you are emigrating to an inferior health system, fewer holidays, worse crime, more guns, a mad political system, and terrible food. The American dream is dead.
For us. It is still immensely attractive to places like central America, Mexico and the Philippines.
Plenty of shit jobs in the UK are really, really attractive to people from overseas.
For those with a good sense of humour, the discovery that Polish people were signing up to the new Northern Ireland Police Service in noticeable numbers was a blessing.
Sein Fein had successfully argued, previously, that non-catholic, non-protestants should be counted as protestants for the 50-50 quota thing.
So you have Protestant Hindus, Protestant Muslims, and Protestant Atheists in the PSNI.
The problem with the Polish types was that they weren't locals. Even though, they were pretty much all Catholics.....
So, after some discussion, they were counted in the Protestant quota.
So, in Northern Ireland, we have Protestant Catholics.
Would make more sense IF they were Czech Catholics!
Read something once while back, about a Jewish kid who grew up in Belfast (one of the leafier bits) who was accosted on the street one fine day and asked, are you Catholic or Protestant.
I'm a Jew, he replied
Ok, then, was the rather puzzled response, are yez a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?
Thinking quickly, and taking what he could surmise about his questioners, he swallowed hard and answered, I'm a Protestant Jew.
Which fortunately for him proved to be he right answer.
Its an old joke (and doubtless has variants in other countries) but a former Israeli President did actually come from Belfast:
Yet non eu bands small and large have been able to tour in the uk with no problems over the years without free movement sounds like luvvie whinging to me
I suspect non-eu bands have been touring, but I bet they had to do the paperwork and permits first.
And why can say american bands manage that but some french band can't? Or some english band do it....can't be eu rules as eu rules were the same for much of the time as we were in the eu most of the last 20 years
Not sure what you mean, France and the UK were in the EU, so could work and tour anywhere in the eu. US wasn't, so couldn't.
Gosh let me fetch my crayons as you appear to be hard of thinking.
What is hard to understand?
US bands regulary tour the eu or UK after filling in the paperwork
why do you think EU bands or UK bands are incapable of filling in the same paperwork because it is all that necessary. Despite the crying no one has been banned from touring just do some paperwork first it isn't rocket science. Nothing will stop band's that want to tour apart from a few damn forms it isn't the end of the world.
Probably what most of these are concerned about is that they could tour due to cultural exchange programs which subsidised the tour and now cant because they wouldn't make any money because frankly the few that actually want to hear them won't pay enough to make it viable. A bit like opera or ballet really
There's no need to be nasty about it, I was only seeking clarification from an expert.
It is also wrong, if we accept the Independent is right that performers from America and elsewhere are also covered by the EU's visa-free arrangements. Otoh, it is right that, as with all the post-Brexit arrangements, things can continue after the appropriate paperwork, not previously required, has been completed and filed. But that is true of much of Brexit: friction has been added to what were previously frictionless transactions.
Some would say it is a price worth paying (for what?); others that this government, or the EU, has ballsed up the negotiations and that a better Brexit settlement was within reach. Some say Brexit was a mistake from the beginning.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
I certainly agree with this last point, but the way to tackle that has to be to tax and regulate extremem wealth surely?
One other issue we all have to face into is that it's irrational to expect incomes to go on increasing forever. There are not resources enough on the earth for us all to have super-yachts; we cannot all live in mansions.
The problem however is not necessarily incomes not increasing but the fact that the cost of living is ever increasing
Sorry, I meant "it's irrational to expect real incomes to go on increasing forever".
But a lot of the time real incomes are falling artificially. Housing costs for many for example are rising for many because we don't build enough houses. Product costs are rising because we get the courts siding with companies over consumers.
On the first, housing costs there are many people for example that are paying more in rent by a couple of hundred than the mortgage would cost for a similar place in the same area but if you apply for a mortgage you will be told you can't afford that mortgage on your salary.
We have companies producing product x in bangladesh and it costs 100£. They wholesale it to retail in Bangladesh for 130£ and in the uk they wholesale it for 600£ and yet if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them.
if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them
Who would they sue? Where would they sue? And what case would they have?
@rcs1000 This is the Tesco Levi's case being referenced is it not?
One way that American is different from Western Europe (including obscure off-shore islands) is that, within a generation, immigrants to our shore become . . . Americans. .
That's often claimed but is it really true? In America it's normal for second or third generation immigrants to cling on to hyphenated identities in a way that would be considered weird in Europe.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
Would an average European now seek to emigrate to America, to secure an average American life?
Would anyone eagerly go from Hamburg to Chicago? Oslo to Ohio? Dublin to Kansas? Lisbon to Detroit? Even from Athens Greece to Athens Georgia?
I don't think so. Outside a top, super-affluent decile of bankers going to NYC, hedge funders to Connecticut, actors to LA, geniuses to Silicon Valley, America is now a less attractive place to live than Europe, and, increasingly, much of Asia.
By going to America you are emigrating to an inferior health system, fewer holidays, worse crime, more guns, a mad political system, and terrible food. The American dream is dead.
For us. It is still immensely attractive to places like central America, Mexico and the Philippines.
Indeed, Which is part of America's problem. It now attracts people from Africa, and LatAm, that many Americans, I fear, would rather not have as immigrants, and the enriching flow of mass immigration from more sophisticated societies has largely stopped.
The many Americans who "fear" Latino & African immigrants, are either racists or idiots. Certainly these newcomers are every bit as "enriching" as the Euro peasants who preceded them from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe.
One way that American is different from Western Europe (including obscure off-shore islands) is that, within a generation, immigrants to our shore become . . . Americans.
E pluribus unum!
BTW, one of the more popular leaders of the NBA these days is Athens, Greece native Giannis Antetokounmpo.
It is naive to think that white Americans - still the majority of the nation - are just as welcoming of Nigerian, Honduran or Pakistani immigrants as they are of Irish, Norwegian or Japanese immigrants. The change in the make up of American immigration ("build the wall!") was one of the drivers of Trump's initial victory, and is still an explosive topic in American politics.
But SSIs point that it only takes a generation for immigrants of any skin colour to become American is still valid. And you see it in my daughter's generation. They are much more at ease with multiracial groups, as they've been in them their entire lives.
I do think that part of the Trumpster issue will simply die out with time - even deepest darkest rural America now has large Latino populations who, within a generation, will be walking, talking and dressing like Americans and who will have grown up through school with white American class and sports team mates.
Of course the Police should also follow the rules and police them fairly and sensibly
Outrageous.
If I was walking with one other person, by a reservoir, say, in Derbyshire, with a coffee (all perfectly legal) and told to return home, I would refuse. Because we don't live in a police state.
In my area all fines issued are reviewed by the police commissioners office.
As for outrageous, I criticise the police overstepping their bounds plenty, and they will no doubt fine people not in breach of the law by mistake, but they are trying to carry out the law so I wouldn't blame them for the outrageousness of the law.
The police are not legally entitled to do this. If you are out taking exercise, there is no limit in the rules on the amount of time you are allowed to be out. Simply sitting down on a park bench in the middle of your exercise does not put you in breach.
I did just that before embarking on a short hill climb this afternoon, as I had got a bit breathless (I know, I need to get fitter) but if some officious policeman had ordered me to leave I'm sure I'd have had enough breath to give him a lesson on the law.
Be careful from my experience pointing out what the law actually says to a police officer can be construed as causing a breach of the peace in some of their minds
I have a fair amount of experience dealing with the police. But thanks.
I pity the poor bloody cop who wrongfully crosses Ms Cyclefree!
Yeah, but it's those out for their many "essential" purposes that explains why our lockdowns are failing to control the disease. This is essential shopping, an essential takeaway, an essential work journey, essential exercise, essential that my child is at school etc etc, and we wind up with the streets, shops and schools all teeming with folk.
Perhaps BoZo is right. The reason that we have bad covid figures is that people see the measures as an attack on their freedom.
Of course the Police should also follow the rules and police them fairly and sensibly
Outrageous.
If I was walking with one other person, by a reservoir, say, in Derbyshire, with a coffee (all perfectly legal) and told to return home, I would refuse. Because we don't live in a police state.
In my area all fines issued are reviewed by the police commissioners office.
As for outrageous, I criticise the police overstepping their bounds plenty, and they will no doubt fine people not in breach of the law by mistake, but they are trying to carry out the law so I wouldn't blame them for the outrageousness of the law.
The police are not legally entitled to do this. If you are out taking exercise, there is no limit in the rules on the amount of time you are allowed to be out. Simply sitting down on a park bench in the middle of your exercise does not put you in breach.
I did just that before embarking on a short hill climb this afternoon, as I had got a bit breathless (I know, I need to get fitter) but if some officious policeman had ordered me to leave I'm sure I'd have had enough breath to give him a lesson on the law.
Be careful from my experience pointing out what the law actually says to a police officer can be construed as causing a breach of the peace in some of their minds
I have a fair amount of experience dealing with the police. But thanks.
I pity the poor bloody cop who wrongfully crosses Ms Cyclefree!
Yeah, but it's those out for their many "essential" purposes that explains why our lockdowns are failing to control the disease. This is essential shopping, an essential takeaway, an essential work journey, essential exercise, essential that my child is at school etc etc, and we wind up with the streets, shops and schools all teeming with folk.
Perhaps BoZo is right. The reason that we have bad covid figures is that people see the measures as an attack on their freedom.
In which case it is the messaging that has failed.
One way that American is different from Western Europe (including obscure off-shore islands) is that, within a generation, immigrants to our shore become . . . Americans. .
That's often claimed but is it really true? In America it's normal for second or third generation immigrants to cling on to hyphenated identities in a way that would be considered weird in Europe.
Yes, I am not sure it is really true.
Britain arguably does a better job of assimilating most immigrants than America. Remarkably.
The absence of guns, on all side - cops and civilians - surely helps. Plus, of course, we do not have the overwhelming historic trauma of massive slavery, on our own soil, and then a terrible civil war that went with it. Even if we did a fair bit of the slave trading, we managed to dodge the psychosis
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
Would an average European now seek to emigrate to America, to secure an average American life?
Would anyone eagerly go from Hamburg to Chicago? Oslo to Ohio? Dublin to Kansas? Lisbon to Detroit? Even from Athens Greece to Athens Georgia?
I don't think so. Outside a top, super-affluent decile of bankers going to NYC, hedge funders to Connecticut, actors to LA, geniuses to Silicon Valley, America is now a less attractive place to live than Europe, and, increasingly, much of Asia.
By going to America you are emigrating to an inferior health system, fewer holidays, worse crime, more guns, a mad political system, and terrible food. The American dream is dead.
For us. It is still immensely attractive to places like central America, Mexico and the Philippines.
Indeed, Which is part of America's problem. It now attracts people from Africa, and LatAm, that many Americans, I fear, would rather not have as immigrants, and the enriching flow of mass immigration from more sophisticated societies has largely stopped.
The many Americans who "fear" Latino & African immigrants, are either racists or idiots. Certainly these newcomers are every bit as "enriching" as the Euro peasants who preceded them from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe.
One way that American is different from Western Europe (including obscure off-shore islands) is that, within a generation, immigrants to our shore become . . . Americans.
E pluribus unum!
BTW, one of the more popular leaders of the NBA these days is Athens, Greece native Giannis Antetokounmpo.
I must be imagining all the Chinatowns. Unless they are populated solely by the first generation, and they then rotate out to be replaced by the next?
To say nothing of the Amish. And all the families still clinging to their Irish heritage. I'm sure there are plenty more examples.
Without eye watering council tax increases many councils will go bust however. Too many are highly invested in commercial property that will no longer be wanted post lockdown, not only the councils but local government pension schemes will also be demanding more top up money as they are similarly highly invested
Of course the Police should also follow the rules and police them fairly and sensibly
Outrageous.
If I was walking with one other person, by a reservoir, say, in Derbyshire, with a coffee (all perfectly legal) and told to return home, I would refuse. Because we don't live in a police state.
In my area all fines issued are reviewed by the police commissioners office.
As for outrageous, I criticise the police overstepping their bounds plenty, and they will no doubt fine people not in breach of the law by mistake, but they are trying to carry out the law so I wouldn't blame them for the outrageousness of the law.
The police are not legally entitled to do this. If you are out taking exercise, there is no limit in the rules on the amount of time you are allowed to be out. Simply sitting down on a park bench in the middle of your exercise does not put you in breach.
I did just that before embarking on a short hill climb this afternoon, as I had got a bit breathless (I know, I need to get fitter) but if some officious policeman had ordered me to leave I'm sure I'd have had enough breath to give him a lesson on the law.
Be careful from my experience pointing out what the law actually says to a police officer can be construed as causing a breach of the peace in some of their minds
I have a fair amount of experience dealing with the police. But thanks.
I pity the poor bloody cop who wrongfully crosses Ms Cyclefree!
Yeah, but it's those out for their many "essential" purposes that explains why our lockdowns are failing to control the disease. This is essential shopping, an essential takeaway, an essential work journey, essential exercise, essential that my child is at school etc etc, and we wind up with the streets, shops and schools all teeming with folk.
Perhaps BoZo is right. The reason that we have bad covid figures is that people see the measures as an attack on their freedom.
Don't disagree at all. The impression, even from the first lockdown has been given that they are all essentially voluntary.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
Would an average European now seek to emigrate to America, to secure an average American life?
Would anyone eagerly go from Hamburg to Chicago? Oslo to Ohio? Dublin to Kansas? Lisbon to Detroit? Even from Athens Greece to Athens Georgia?
I don't think so. Outside a top, super-affluent decile of bankers going to NYC, hedge funders to Connecticut, actors to LA, geniuses to Silicon Valley, America is now a less attractive place to live than Europe, and, increasingly, much of Asia.
By going to America you are emigrating to an inferior health system, fewer holidays, worse crime, more guns, a mad political system, and terrible food. The American dream is dead.
For us. It is still immensely attractive to places like central America, Mexico and the Philippines.
Indeed, Which is part of America's problem. It now attracts people from Africa, and LatAm, that many Americans, I fear, would rather not have as immigrants, and the enriching flow of mass immigration from more sophisticated societies has largely stopped.
The many Americans who "fear" Latino & African immigrants, are either racists or idiots. Certainly these newcomers are every bit as "enriching" as the Euro peasants who preceded them from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe.
One way that American is different from Western Europe (including obscure off-shore islands) is that, within a generation, immigrants to our shore become . . . Americans.
E pluribus unum!
BTW, one of the more popular leaders of the NBA these days is Athens, Greece native Giannis Antetokounmpo.
It is naive to think that white Americans - still the majority of the nation - are just as welcoming of Nigerian, Honduran or Pakistani immigrants as they are of Irish, Norwegian or Japanese immigrants. The change in the make up of American immigration ("build the wall!") was one of the drivers of Trump's initial victory, and is still an explosive topic in American politics.
Though Nigerian migrants to the USA are the best qualified of all immigrant groups.
"According to the U.S census about 43.8 percent of African immigrants achieved the most college degrees, compared to 42.5 percent of Asian-Americans, 28.9 percent for immigrants from Europe, Russia and Canada and 23.1 percent of the U.S. population as a whole."
But you are correct, they have the wrong pigmentation.
I went to the large local Tesco today for the first time in a week and it was heaving. So much so that the traffic lights above the door were actually in operation. I must say that almost nobody was making any effort to socially distance including the staff. The whole thing was incredibly stressful.
Let's face it, Gavin Williamson's spider is also in the running to replace Gavin Williamson as Education Secretary. The story sounds like ill-informed gossip but might have been floated to boost one or other of those named (or not named -- I've not read the paywalled Times).
They keep making the same mistakes again and again. They should ease the restrictions when the cases are low enough, not on some arbitrary date for fuck sake.
They keep making the same mistakes again and again. They should ease the restrictions when the cases are low enough, not on some arbitrary date for fuck sake.
And they leak it...so everybody expects it.....and it is way too soon regardless.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
Would an average European now seek to emigrate to America, to secure an average American life?
Would anyone eagerly go from Hamburg to Chicago? Oslo to Ohio? Dublin to Kansas? Lisbon to Detroit? Even from Athens Greece to Athens Georgia?
I don't think so. Outside a top, super-affluent decile of bankers going to NYC, hedge funders to Connecticut, actors to LA, geniuses to Silicon Valley, America is now a less attractive place to live than Europe, and, increasingly, much of Asia.
By going to America you are emigrating to an inferior health system, fewer holidays, worse crime, more guns, a mad political system, and terrible food. The American dream is dead.
For us. It is still immensely attractive to places like central America, Mexico and the Philippines.
Indeed, Which is part of America's problem. It now attracts people from Africa, and LatAm, that many Americans, I fear, would rather not have as immigrants, and the enriching flow of mass immigration from more sophisticated societies has largely stopped.
The many Americans who "fear" Latino & African immigrants, are either racists or idiots. Certainly these newcomers are every bit as "enriching" as the Euro peasants who preceded them from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe.
One way that American is different from Western Europe (including obscure off-shore islands) is that, within a generation, immigrants to our shore become . . . Americans.
E pluribus unum!
BTW, one of the more popular leaders of the NBA these days is Athens, Greece native Giannis Antetokounmpo.
It is naive to think that white Americans - still the majority of the nation - are just as welcoming of Nigerian, Honduran or Pakistani immigrants as they are of Irish, Norwegian or Japanese immigrants. The change in the make up of American immigration ("build the wall!") was one of the drivers of Trump's initial victory, and is still an explosive topic in American politics.
But SSIs point that it only takes a generation for immigrants of any skin colour to become American is still valid. And you see it in my daughter's generation. They are much more at ease with multiracial groups, as they've been in them their entire lives.
I do think that part of the Trumpster issue will simply die out with time - even deepest darkest rural America now has large Latino populations who, within a generation, will be walking, talking and dressing like Americans and who will have grown up through school with white American class and sports team mates.
I take your point, but I am less optimistic, I think the moment America becomes a "minority" nation, where whites are no longer the majority, will be singularly perilous. As it would be for any country, except you have guns and a tradition of violent revolution. As we have seen this week.
This is not because Americans are uniquely bad, let alone racist - they are not, they are, in my experience, very tolerant, generous and kind - I suspect the same would happen in any country. Indeed many countries would simply not allow it: India and China spring to mind. And much of Europe. It is a very dangerous thing to attempt. Cf the history of Fiji
I went to the large local Tesco today for the first time in a week and it was heaving. So much so that the traffic lights above the door were actually in operation. I must say that almost nobody was making any effort to socially distance including the staff. The whole thing was incredibly stressful.
The Co-op here was OK Saturday, as was Sainsbury's Friday (when there were people outside from the council handing out free face masks). Remember the social distancing guidelines are only 1m if masks are worn (unless that's changed again) and are more-or-less enforced by using trolleys.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
Would an average European now seek to emigrate to America, to secure an average American life?
Would anyone eagerly go from Hamburg to Chicago? Oslo to Ohio? Dublin to Kansas? Lisbon to Detroit? Even from Athens Greece to Athens Georgia?
I don't think so. Outside a top, super-affluent decile of bankers going to NYC, hedge funders to Connecticut, actors to LA, geniuses to Silicon Valley, America is now a less attractive place to live than Europe, and, increasingly, much of Asia.
By going to America you are emigrating to an inferior health system, fewer holidays, worse crime, more guns, a mad political system, and terrible food. The American dream is dead.
For us. It is still immensely attractive to places like central America, Mexico and the Philippines.
Indeed, Which is part of America's problem. It now attracts people from Africa, and LatAm, that many Americans, I fear, would rather not have as immigrants, and the enriching flow of mass immigration from more sophisticated societies has largely stopped.
The many Americans who "fear" Latino & African immigrants, are either racists or idiots. Certainly these newcomers are every bit as "enriching" as the Euro peasants who preceded them from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe.
One way that American is different from Western Europe (including obscure off-shore islands) is that, within a generation, immigrants to our shore become . . . Americans.
E pluribus unum!
BTW, one of the more popular leaders of the NBA these days is Athens, Greece native Giannis Antetokounmpo.
It is naive to think that white Americans - still the majority of the nation - are just as welcoming of Nigerian, Honduran or Pakistani immigrants as they are of Irish, Norwegian or Japanese immigrants. The change in the make up of American immigration ("build the wall!") was one of the drivers of Trump's initial victory, and is still an explosive topic in American politics.
But SSIs point that it only takes a generation for immigrants of any skin colour to become American is still valid. And you see it in my daughter's generation. They are much more at ease with multiracial groups, as they've been in them their entire lives.
I do think that part of the Trumpster issue will simply die out with time - even deepest darkest rural America now has large Latino populations who, within a generation, will be walking, talking and dressing like Americans and who will have grown up through school with white American class and sports team mates.
In support of SSI's view, it's always struck me that while a lot of people seem to be aware of race as a dividing line, much more than in Britain, actually most American of all ethnic groups seem more like each other than they do like Brits. I don't mean better or worse, just distinctively different - more extrovert, more hospitable, more religious, more patriotic. Of course it's a generalisation, but it seems to me that many Americans underestimate their similarities and the strength of their culture.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
Would an average European now seek to emigrate to America, to secure an average American life?
Would anyone eagerly go from Hamburg to Chicago? Oslo to Ohio? Dublin to Kansas? Lisbon to Detroit? Even from Athens Greece to Athens Georgia?
I don't think so. Outside a top, super-affluent decile of bankers going to NYC, hedge funders to Connecticut, actors to LA, geniuses to Silicon Valley, America is now a less attractive place to live than Europe, and, increasingly, much of Asia.
By going to America you are emigrating to an inferior health system, fewer holidays, worse crime, more guns, a mad political system, and terrible food. The American dream is dead.
For us. It is still immensely attractive to places like central America, Mexico and the Philippines.
Indeed, Which is part of America's problem. It now attracts people from Africa, and LatAm, that many Americans, I fear, would rather not have as immigrants, and the enriching flow of mass immigration from more sophisticated societies has largely stopped.
The many Americans who "fear" Latino & African immigrants, are either racists or idiots. Certainly these newcomers are every bit as "enriching" as the Euro peasants who preceded them from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe.
One way that American is different from Western Europe (including obscure off-shore islands) is that, within a generation, immigrants to our shore become . . . Americans.
E pluribus unum!
BTW, one of the more popular leaders of the NBA these days is Athens, Greece native Giannis Antetokounmpo.
It is naive to think that white Americans - still the majority of the nation - are just as welcoming of Nigerian, Honduran or Pakistani immigrants as they are of Irish, Norwegian or Japanese immigrants. The change in the make up of American immigration ("build the wall!") was one of the drivers of Trump's initial victory, and is still an explosive topic in American politics.
But SSIs point that it only takes a generation for immigrants of any skin colour to become American is still valid. And you see it in my daughter's generation. They are much more at ease with multiracial groups, as they've been in them their entire lives.
I do think that part of the Trumpster issue will simply die out with time - even deepest darkest rural America now has large Latino populations who, within a generation, will be walking, talking and dressing like Americans and who will have grown up through school with white American class and sports team mates.
I take your point, but I am less optimistic, I think the moment America becomes a "minority" nation, where whites are no longer the majority, will be singularly perilous. As it would be for any country, except you have guns and a tradition of violent revolution. As we have seen this week.
This is not because Americans are uniquely bad, let alone racist - they are not, they are, in my experience, very tolerant, generous and kind - I suspect the same would happen in any country. Indeed many countries would simply not allow it: India and China spring to mind. And much of Europe. It is a very dangerous thing to attempt. Cf the history of Fiji
Except America is by definition a nation built mainly of immigrants.
That is not the case for India, China and Europe. The only original Americans are the native American Indians
I can see it already...Boris giving a speech of sound of leather on willow, strawberries and Pimm's at Wimbledon...all these great British summertime activities will be back and you will be able to watch them in person....when we are still in March and only 10 million people vaccinated.
Multiple friends In London saying the key worker requirement is going to be tightened at their kids' schools to cope with them being overwhelmed by 'key worker' children.
Britain arguably does a better job of assimilating most immigrants than America. Remarkably.
I'm scratching my head trying to work out why anyone would think to say such a thing. Struggling to even think what evidence you would look for to say it's true or false.
I went to the large local Tesco today for the first time in a week and it was heaving. So much so that the traffic lights above the door were actually in operation. I must say that almost nobody was making any effort to socially distance including the staff. The whole thing was incredibly stressful.
One of the things that has kept me going to my local Waitrose, apart from the fact that it sells nice food & booze, is that it has been a civilised shopping experience throughout
Toomey says Trump ‘committed impeachable offenses’ But the Pennsylvania senator said he doesn’t know whether it’s “practical” to move ahead with impeachment proceedings.
I do NOT agree very often with Senator Toomey, some we're both pretty glad about for the most part.
However, in this instance, I agree with him 100%
Suggest that PBers start looking at the list of Republican elected leaders - elected by the people, not some hack committee - who support Trumpsky after his failed Putsch, and how many oppose him directly, some to the point of calling for his removal ASAP.
With respect to both camps within the GOP, there is a complex interplay between each individual's conviction, circumspection, situation, self-interest and self-respect. For example, at least on paper Governors of Maryland and Vermont to come out against POTUS than say a US Senator (or Congressman or state legislator) from Alabama or West Virginia.
Speaking of the Mountain State, the Putchist who was (newly-elected) Republican member of WV House of Delegates has resigned, as noted down-thred, following his arrest in DC and public condemnation of him by WV Sentators, Governor & fellow GOP legislators including Speaker of HoD. Which I interpret as, them telling him he'd damn well better resign, and if he did they just MIGHT put in a good word for him.
Anyway, pretty standard procedure in cases of legislative scandal, on both side of the aisle. Though charges of sedition & attempted overthrow of US Constitution ARE somewhat novel if not entirely unique in our history.
In Senator Toomey's case, the risk on paper looks low, given that he's in state Biden carried AND is NOT running for re-election. HOWEVER his statement is breath-taking. Note that MOST of the PA House Republicans actively supported the Rudi-Sidney charade of objections, along with Hawley, Cruz, etc. in the Senate.
IF Pat Toomey is NOT conservative enough for you, they you are a TRUE wing-nut. AND your own political base is in SERIOUS jeopardy, enhanced by the longer you fail to recognized their has been a sea change since - or rather because of - the Trumpsky Putsch.
They keep making the same mistakes again and again. They should ease the restrictions when the cases are low enough, not on some arbitrary date for fuck sake.
I guarantee most people are not aware of the precise date anyway, so why draw it to people's attention?
Retired doctors will still have to fill out 15 forms before being allowed to take part in the mass coronavirus vaccination programme despite claims from Boris Johnson that red tape had been slashed.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
Would an average European now seek to emigrate to America, to secure an average American life?
Would anyone eagerly go from Hamburg to Chicago? Oslo to Ohio? Dublin to Kansas? Lisbon to Detroit? Even from Athens Greece to Athens Georgia?
I don't think so. Outside a top, super-affluent decile of bankers going to NYC, hedge funders to Connecticut, actors to LA, geniuses to Silicon Valley, America is now a less attractive place to live than Europe, and, increasingly, much of Asia.
By going to America you are emigrating to an inferior health system, fewer holidays, worse crime, more guns, a mad political system, and terrible food. The American dream is dead.
For us. It is still immensely attractive to places like central America, Mexico and the Philippines.
Indeed, Which is part of America's problem. It now attracts people from Africa, and LatAm, that many Americans, I fear, would rather not have as immigrants, and the enriching flow of mass immigration from more sophisticated societies has largely stopped.
The many Americans who "fear" Latino & African immigrants, are either racists or idiots. Certainly these newcomers are every bit as "enriching" as the Euro peasants who preceded them from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe.
One way that American is different from Western Europe (including obscure off-shore islands) is that, within a generation, immigrants to our shore become . . . Americans.
E pluribus unum!
BTW, one of the more popular leaders of the NBA these days is Athens, Greece native Giannis Antetokounmpo.
It is naive to think that white Americans - still the majority of the nation - are just as welcoming of Nigerian, Honduran or Pakistani immigrants as they are of Irish, Norwegian or Japanese immigrants. The change in the make up of American immigration ("build the wall!") was one of the drivers of Trump's initial victory, and is still an explosive topic in American politics.
But SSIs point that it only takes a generation for immigrants of any skin colour to become American is still valid. And you see it in my daughter's generation. They are much more at ease with multiracial groups, as they've been in them their entire lives.
I do think that part of the Trumpster issue will simply die out with time - even deepest darkest rural America now has large Latino populations who, within a generation, will be walking, talking and dressing like Americans and who will have grown up through school with white American class and sports team mates.
In support of SSI's view, it's always struck me that while a lot of people seem to be aware of race as a dividing lthan in Britain, actually most American of all ethnic groups seem more like each other than they do like Brits. I don't mean better or worse, just distinctively different - more extrovert, more hospitable, more religious, more patriotic. Of course it's a generalisation, but it seems to me that many Americans underestimate their similarities and the strength of their culture.
A brave argument to make in the week American democracy was, it seems, nearly overthrown by a populist, demagogue, demented, and very white president, determined on a coup - who was elected on a basis of racial hostility to immigration, building walls abutting Mexico, and a lot of nasty and generalised xenophobia.
In your comment you are describing the optimistic America of 20-30 years ago. It would be nice if it were still true. It is not.
Of course the Police should also follow the rules and police them fairly and sensibly
Outrageous.
If I was walking with one other person, by a reservoir, say, in Derbyshire, with a coffee (all perfectly legal) and told to return home, I would refuse. Because we don't live in a police state.
In my area all fines issued are reviewed by the police commissioners office.
Police shouldn't be handing out fines to people who don't break the law.
I can't believe I am having to write that.
I don't disagree and the police do overstep the law and when that happens it is a disgrace - I've criticised that on many occasions, not least when the guidance does not match the law - but the headline says where they believe people to be in 'breach of the rules', so the implication was where someone appeared to be in breach of the law. Therefore the outrageousness would be the law, not the police action
What law would this be exactly?
I really think people are missing my point and I don't understand why. Some people appear to be objecting to the very principle of the police issuing fines at all, when we know that people are indeed fined for Covid-19 breaches legitimately. I'm saying that having a problem with the police for that is looking in the wrong place.
The police wrongly issuing fines is absolutely their fault, which is why I am glad the fines are reviewed, though they should get it right in the first place.
I don't see what is controversial about that. Parliament has given the police a lot of power, and people can be mad at that, but they have been given it. The police, however, need to utilise that power correctly.
From these responses people seem to be arguing against a non-position that it is ok for them to fine people incorrectly, and no one is suggesing that.
I think you've been missing my point from the start. Going back to the original headline:
Every police officer has been told to fine people £200 if they believe they are in breach of the rules
The police should NOT be issuing any fines UNLESS they have clear evidence of a LAW being broken.
Not a 'rule' or a guideline breeched. A law. The Covid laws are very specific. 2m, for example, is not in law.
They should also have to do more than 'believe' - they should have prima facie evidence. In most cases that will be witnessing breaches of the law. I don't object to them issuing fines for law breakers.
And the review process doesn't negate incorrect imposition of fines. If police are acting on 'beliefs' and 'rules' rather than 'evidence' and 'laws' the rule of law in this country has broken down, and the sacred trust that is policing by consent absolutely violated.
I apologise if you were not objecting merely to the principle of fines being issued, which I had taken to be the case. I'm not in disagreement on any point about the police imposing based on guidelines rather than the law, though I'm depressed they are still doing that.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
I certainly agree with this last point, but the way to tackle that has to be to tax and regulate extremem wealth surely?
One other issue we all have to face into is that it's irrational to expect incomes to go on increasing forever. There are not resources enough on the earth for us all to have super-yachts; we cannot all live in mansions.
The problem however is not necessarily incomes not increasing but the fact that the cost of living is ever increasing
Sorry, I meant "it's irrational to expect real incomes to go on increasing forever".
But a lot of the time real incomes are falling artificially. Housing costs for many for example are rising for many because we don't build enough houses. Product costs are rising because we get the courts siding with companies over consumers.
On the first, housing costs there are many people for example that are paying more in rent by a couple of hundred than the mortgage would cost for a similar place in the same area but if you apply for a mortgage you will be told you can't afford that mortgage on your salary.
We have companies producing product x in bangladesh and it costs 100£. They wholesale it to retail in Bangladesh for 130£ and in the uk they wholesale it for 600£ and yet if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them.
if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them
Who would they sue? Where would they sue? And what case would they have?
@rcs1000 This is the Tesco Levi's case being referenced is it not?
The most utterly ridiculous case.
That wasn't about Tesco buying jeans from a factory in Bangladesh (which they are free to do). It was about whether Tesco could market Levi jeans that it had grey market imported into the UK. (Therefore benefiting from Levi's marketing budget, without contributing.)
Now, I think the decision was wrong - ultimately grey market imports should be allowed - but it was not about whether a retailer could import and sell jeans from Bangladesh.
If stopped en route to work, I will calmly explain that I cannot work from home. That is perfectly allowed within the law. It shouldn't go any further than that.
The onus would be on the police to prove that I am not in fact en route to work. Otherwise we're not far off 'ihre papier, bitte'
There was a time when Conservatives supported the idea of identity cards.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
Would an average European now seek to emigrate to America, to secure an average American life?
Would anyone eagerly go from Hamburg to Chicago? Oslo to Ohio? Dublin to Kansas? Lisbon to Detroit? Even from Athens Greece to Athens Georgia?
I don't think so. Outside a top, super-affluent decile of bankers going to NYC, hedge funders to Connecticut, actors to LA, geniuses to Silicon Valley, America is now a less attractive place to live than Europe, and, increasingly, much of Asia.
By going to America you are emigrating to an inferior health system, fewer holidays, worse crime, more guns, a mad political system, and terrible food. The American dream is dead.
For us. It is still immensely attractive to places like central America, Mexico and the Philippines.
Indeed, Which is part of America's problem. It now attracts people from Africa, and LatAm, that many Americans, I fear, would rather not have as immigrants, and the enriching flow of mass immigration from more sophisticated societies has largely stopped.
The many Americans who "fear" Latino & African immigrants, are either racists or idiots. Certainly these newcomers are every bit as "enriching" as the Euro peasants who preceded them from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe.
One way that American is different from Western Europe (including obscure off-shore islands) is that, within a generation, immigrants to our shore become . . . Americans.
E pluribus unum!
BTW, one of the more popular leaders of the NBA these days is Athens, Greece native Giannis Antetokounmpo.
It is naive to think that white Americans - still the majority of the nation - are just as welcoming of Nigerian, Honduran or Pakistani immigrants as they are of Irish, Norwegian or Japanese immigrants. The change in the make up of American immigration ("build the wall!") was one of the drivers of Trump's initial victory, and is still an explosive topic in American politics.
But SSIs point that it only takes a generation for immigrants of any skin colour to become American is still valid. And you see it in my daughter's generation. They are much more at ease with multiracial groups, as they've been in them their entire lives.
I do think that part of the Trumpster issue will simply die out with time - even deepest darkest rural America now has large Latino populations who, within a generation, will be walking, talking and dressing like Americans and who will have grown up through school with white American class and sports team mates.
In support of SSI's view, it's always struck me that while a lot of people seem to be aware of race as a dividing line, much more than in Britain, actually most American of all ethnic groups seem more like each other than they do like Brits. I don't mean better or worse, just distinctively different - more extrovert, more hospitable, more religious, more patriotic. Of course it's a generalisation, but it seems to me that many Americans underestimate their similarities and the strength of their culture.
I agree, but I think that is from the eye of the foreign beholder.
When I meet Dutch Javanese, or French Arabs, or Danish Somalians, I am always struck by how Dutch, French or Danish they are. Similarly when my Leicester Gujerati friends have relatives visiting from North America or Australia, it throws a light on how British my friends are.
An overseas observer sees the similarities, a native sees the differences.
I went to the large local Tesco today for the first time in a week and it was heaving. So much so that the traffic lights above the door were actually in operation. I must say that almost nobody was making any effort to socially distance including the staff. The whole thing was incredibly stressful.
For many people walking around a supermarket is the best exercise they get.
Mr Harwood needs to look up the meaning of the words "temporary" and "holiday".
If there was to be any extension, it was always going to be announced at the last minute anyway. Ending the holiday during an effective lockdown is pretty silly when the housing market is on suspension because buyers can't travel to see properties and surveyors can't survey them.
It will be extended through to end of June at least is my expectation, due to intense lobbying from MPs.
I went to the large local Tesco today for the first time in a week and it was heaving. So much so that the traffic lights above the door were actually in operation. I must say that almost nobody was making any effort to socially distance including the staff. The whole thing was incredibly stressful.
One of the things that has kept me going to my local Waitrose, apart from the fact that it sells nice food & booze, is that it has been a civilised shopping experience throughout
Here in Seattle I can say the same thing about my local Fred Meyer super-grocery store. My impression has always been that "Dead Fred's" is managed by a pack of over-weight, under-educated rednecks. But they have done I good job generally I think dealing with COVID and it's new realities.
Pick your time and it's not too crowded most of the time. AND Fred Meyer was good from the first about requesting and requiring masks, for employees and customers, and have stayed that way. As for the employees, don't really know but based on their appearance & demeanor they look reasonably satisfied with their lot AND happy (enough) to still be working.
And they ARE most definitely essential workers. AND running greater risks of catching COVID than many (including me) because they MUST interact with LOTS of people every working day, to some degree and at some proximity.
Britain arguably does a better job of assimilating most immigrants than America. Remarkably.
I'm scratching my head trying to work out why anyone would think to say such a thing. Struggling to even think what evidence you would look for to say it's true or false.
"Don't Hit Families with Inflation Busting Council Tax Hikes" said SKS.
He is becoming ridiculous.
In Wales -- where SKS seems not have realised Labour are in charge -- "inflation busting" increase have already been announced by Cardiff and Caerffili Councils.
Caerffili, a Labour controlled Council since forever, is one of the most corrupt Councils in the UK.
The Council Leader resigned in November following the discovery of the fact that he held shares in a company that benefited from a £38.5 million investment of Caerffili Council funds.
If stopped en route to work, I will calmly explain that I cannot work from home. That is perfectly allowed within the law. It shouldn't go any further than that.
The onus would be on the police to prove that I am not in fact en route to work. Otherwise we're not far off 'ihre papier, bitte'
There was a time when Conservatives supported the idea of identity cards.
Britain arguably does a better job of assimilating most immigrants than America. Remarkably.
I'm scratching my head trying to work out why anyone would think to say such a thing. Struggling to even think what evidence you would look for to say it's true or false.
My best guess is that you just "feel" it's true.
George Floyd died in America, not Swindon
George Floyd wasn't an immigrant. Are you confusing Black and foreign AGAIN?
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
I certainly agree with this last point, but the way to tackle that has to be to tax and regulate extremem wealth surely?
One other issue we all have to face into is that it's irrational to expect incomes to go on increasing forever. There are not resources enough on the earth for us all to have super-yachts; we cannot all live in mansions.
The problem however is not necessarily incomes not increasing but the fact that the cost of living is ever increasing
Sorry, I meant "it's irrational to expect real incomes to go on increasing forever".
But a lot of the time real incomes are falling artificially. Housing costs for many for example are rising for many because we don't build enough houses. Product costs are rising because we get the courts siding with companies over consumers.
On the first, housing costs there are many people for example that are paying more in rent by a couple of hundred than the mortgage would cost for a similar place in the same area but if you apply for a mortgage you will be told you can't afford that mortgage on your salary.
We have companies producing product x in bangladesh and it costs 100£. They wholesale it to retail in Bangladesh for 130£ and in the uk they wholesale it for 600£ and yet if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them.
if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them
Who would they sue? Where would they sue? And what case would they have?
@rcs1000 This is the Tesco Levi's case being referenced is it not?
The most utterly ridiculous case.
That wasn't about Tesco buying jeans from a factory in Bangladesh (which they are free to do). It was about whether Tesco could market Levi jeans that it had grey market imported into the UK. (Therefore benefiting from Levi's marketing budget, without contributing.)
Now, I think the decision was wrong - ultimately grey market imports should be allowed - but it was not about whether a retailer could import and sell jeans from Bangladesh.
Well for one the jeans were sourced in the US if you read the article. Sorry I don't agree at all about the branded bit. An IPhone is an IPhone wherever its sourced same for designer goods. Levi's marketing budget is irrelevant to this and it isn't that Levi's were making a loss on the jeans they merely weren't making as much profit as they wanted to.
Of course the Police should also follow the rules and police them fairly and sensibly
Outrageous.
If I was walking with one other person, by a reservoir, say, in Derbyshire, with a coffee (all perfectly legal) and told to return home, I would refuse. Because we don't live in a police state.
In my area all fines issued are reviewed by the police commissioners office.
As for outrageous, I criticise the police overstepping their bounds plenty, and they will no doubt fine people not in breach of the law by mistake, but they are trying to carry out the law so I wouldn't blame them for the outrageousness of the law.
The police are not legally entitled to do this. If you are out taking exercise, there is no limit in the rules on the amount of time you are allowed to be out. Simply sitting down on a park bench in the middle of your exercise does not put you in breach.
I did just that before embarking on a short hill climb this afternoon, as I had got a bit breathless (I know, I need to get fitter) but if some officious policeman had ordered me to leave I'm sure I'd have had enough breath to give him a lesson on the law.
Be careful from my experience pointing out what the law actually says to a police officer can be construed as causing a breach of the peace in some of their minds
I have a fair amount of experience dealing with the police. But thanks.
I pity the poor bloody cop who wrongfully crosses Ms Cyclefree!
Yeah, but it's those out for their many "essential" purposes that explains why our lockdowns are failing to control the disease. This is essential shopping, an essential takeaway, an essential work journey, essential exercise, essential that my child is at school etc etc, and we wind up with the streets, shops and schools all teeming with folk.
Perhaps BoZo is right. The reason that we have bad covid figures is that people see the measures as an attack on their freedom.
Er.... it's the government which has widened the definition of key workers so that many more children are at school than in Lockdown 1. Given how key schools are to the virus's spread that is a daft thing to do. That is down to the government.
Rather than berating some poor woman having exercise maybe the government could require supermarkets to enforce social distancing in their stores a bit better. Because while my daughter is leaving takeaways for her customers on a table outside her premises at a preordained time so that there is no interaction at all and then delivering alcohol to other customers, again without any interaction, the local Tesco's the last time I went was an absolute free-for-all.
I won't be going there again for a long long while. My daily walk is my only escape from the house. Indeed, I'd quite welcome some police officer to berate because it'd be nice to see a different human being for a change.
If government wants the strictest possible lockdown it can do that but it will have to pay the cost of that - and it doesn't want to. IMO Sunak is responsible for undermining the government's health strategy by failing to properly support those whose activities need to be temporarily stopped. He never does enough and what he does do is too late.
"Don't Hit Families with Inflation Busting Council Tax Hikes" said SKS.
He is becoming ridiculous.
In Wales -- where SKS seems not have realised Labour are in charge -- "inflation busting" increase have already been announced by Cardiff and Caerffili Councils.
Caerffili, a Labour controlled Council since forever, is one of the most corrupt Councils in the UK.
The Council Leader resigned in November following the discovery of the fact that he held shares in a company that benefited from a £38.5 million investment of Caerffili Council funds.
Maybe if the Valleys Councillors (like Councillor Poole) didn't steal public money, SKS could have his wish.
Welsh Labour are this separate entity that have no connection to the party Starmer leads...or so some try to claim. They are like the crazy inappropriate uncle that nobody in the family like to admit they are related to.
Britain arguably does a better job of assimilating most immigrants than America. Remarkably.
I'm scratching my head trying to work out why anyone would think to say such a thing. Struggling to even think what evidence you would look for to say it's true or false.
My best guess is that you just "feel" it's true.
George Floyd died in America, not Swindon
George Floyd wasn't an immigrant. Are you confusing Black and foreign AGAIN?
If stopped en route to work, I will calmly explain that I cannot work from home. That is perfectly allowed within the law. It shouldn't go any further than that.
The onus would be on the police to prove that I am not in fact en route to work. Otherwise we're not far off 'ihre papier, bitte'
There was a time when Conservatives supported the idea of identity cards.
And Labour.
New Labour
Like old labour are less authoritarian? Socialists have always been authoritarian because its the only way the system works because you can't let people opt out of it
These shops that people go out of the house to visit...what are these mythical institutions?
Down here in Devon, supermarkets and garden centres. There's nothing else open.
I have this vague recollection of them, but I haven't been in one since last February....which is crazy when I think about it.
At College of Law, we rented a house from a solicitor. The previous occupants had trashed a few things so we had to get them replaced by him. He wandered round the department store like he'd been dropped in from Cold War Romania, his eyes lighting up at everything in there.
Eventually he said "You know, I haven't bought a thing for thirty years...." His wife bought EVERYTHING in his life.
I went to the large local Tesco today for the first time in a week and it was heaving. So much so that the traffic lights above the door were actually in operation. I must say that almost nobody was making any effort to socially distance including the staff. The whole thing was incredibly stressful.
One of the things that has kept me going to my local Waitrose, apart from the fact that it sells nice food & booze, is that it has been a civilised shopping experience throughout
Of course the Police should also follow the rules and police them fairly and sensibly
Outrageous.
If I was walking with one other person, by a reservoir, say, in Derbyshire, with a coffee (all perfectly legal) and told to return home, I would refuse. Because we don't live in a police state.
In my area all fines issued are reviewed by the police commissioners office.
As for outrageous, I criticise the police overstepping their bounds plenty, and they will no doubt fine people not in breach of the law by mistake, but they are trying to carry out the law so I wouldn't blame them for the outrageousness of the law.
The police are not legally entitled to do this. If you are out taking exercise, there is no limit in the rules on the amount of time you are allowed to be out. Simply sitting down on a park bench in the middle of your exercise does not put you in breach.
I did just that before embarking on a short hill climb this afternoon, as I had got a bit breathless (I know, I need to get fitter) but if some officious policeman had ordered me to leave I'm sure I'd have had enough breath to give him a lesson on the law.
Be careful from my experience pointing out what the law actually says to a police officer can be construed as causing a breach of the peace in some of their minds
I have a fair amount of experience dealing with the police. But thanks.
I pity the poor bloody cop who wrongfully crosses Ms Cyclefree!
Yeah, but it's those out for their many "essential" purposes that explains why our lockdowns are failing to control the disease. This is essential shopping, an essential takeaway, an essential work journey, essential exercise, essential that my child is at school etc etc, and we wind up with the streets, shops and schools all teeming with folk.
Perhaps BoZo is right. The reason that we have bad covid figures is that people see the measures as an attack on their freedom.
Er.... it's the government which has widened the definition of key workers so that many more children are at school than in Lockdown 1. Given how key schools are to the virus's spread that is a daft thing to do. That is down to the government.
Rather than berating some poor woman having exercise maybe the government could require supermarkets to enforce social distancing in their stores a bit better. Because while my daughter is leaving takeaways for her customers on a table outside her premises at a preordained time so that there is no interaction at all and then delivering alcohol to other customers, again without any interaction, the local Tesco's the last time I went was an absolute free-for-all.
I won't be going there again for a long long while. My daily walk is my only escape from the house. Indeed, I'd quite welcome some police officer to berate because it'd be nice to see a different human being for a change.
If government wants the strictest possible lockdown it can do that but it will have to pay the cost of that - and it doesn't want to. IMO Sunak is responsible for undermining the government's health strategy by failing to properly support those whose activities need to be temporarily stopped. He never does enough and what he does do is too late.
I've never really understood the worry about supermarkets.
Even if someone does walk right past me, cms away, the exposure is for such a short period of time.
Of course the Police should also follow the rules and police them fairly and sensibly
Outrageous.
If I was walking with one other person, by a reservoir, say, in Derbyshire, with a coffee (all perfectly legal) and told to return home, I would refuse. Because we don't live in a police state.
In my area all fines issued are reviewed by the police commissioners office.
Police shouldn't be handing out fines to people who don't break the law.
I can't believe I am having to write that.
I don't disagree and the police do overstep the law and when that happens it is a disgrace - I've criticised that on many occasions, not least when the guidance does not match the law - but the headline says where they believe people to be in 'breach of the rules', so the implication was where someone appeared to be in breach of the law. Therefore the outrageousness would be the law, not the police action
What law would this be exactly?
I really think people are missing my point and I don't understand why. Some people appear to be objecting to the very principle of the police issuing fines at all, when we know that people are indeed fined for Covid-19 breaches legitimately. I'm saying that having a problem with the police for that is looking in the wrong place.
The police wrongly issuing fines is absolutely their fault, which is why I am glad the fines are reviewed, though they should get it right in the first place.
I don't see what is controversial about that. Parliament has given the police a lot of power, and people can be mad at that, but they have been given it. The police, however, need to utilise that power correctly.
From these responses people seem to be arguing against a non-position that it is ok for them to fine people incorrectly, and no one is suggesing that.
I think you've been missing my point from the start. Going back to the original headline:
Every police officer has been told to fine people £200 if they believe they are in breach of the rules
The police should NOT be issuing any fines UNLESS they have clear evidence of a LAW being broken.
Not a 'rule' or a guideline breeched. A law. The Covid laws are very specific. 2m, for example, is not in law.
They should also have to do more than 'believe' - they should have prima facie evidence. In most cases that will be witnessing breaches of the law. I don't object to them issuing fines for law breakers.
And the review process doesn't negate incorrect imposition of fines. If police are acting on 'beliefs' and 'rules' rather than 'evidence' and 'laws' the rule of law in this country has broken down, and the sacred trust that is policing by consent absolutely violated.
I apologise if you were not objecting merely to the principle of fines being issued, which I had taken to be the case. I'm not in disagreement on any point about the police imposing based on guidelines rather than the law, though I'm depressed they are still doing that.
No apology necessary. I was so fuming from the headline that I wasn't very clear until my last post!
These shops that people go out of the house to visit...what are these mythical institutions?
Down here in Devon, supermarkets and garden centres. There's nothing else open.
I have this vague recollection of them, but I haven't been in one since last February....which is crazy when I think about it.
At College of Law, we rented a house from a solicitor. The previous occupants had trashed a few things so we had to get them replaced by him. He wandered round the department store like he'd been dropped in from Cold War Romania, his eyes lighting up at everything in there.
Eventually he said "You know, I haven't bought a thing for thirty years...." His wife bought EVERYTHING in his life.
I think I may be a bit like that when I finally return to shopping in Waitrose in person. Past 11 months had regular deliveries, but when things are gone, they are gone until next week / fortnight. Has made meals rather dull at times.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
I certainly agree with this last point, but the way to tackle that has to be to tax and regulate extremem wealth surely?
One other issue we all have to face into is that it's irrational to expect incomes to go on increasing forever. There are not resources enough on the earth for us all to have super-yachts; we cannot all live in mansions.
The problem however is not necessarily incomes not increasing but the fact that the cost of living is ever increasing
Sorry, I meant "it's irrational to expect real incomes to go on increasing forever".
But a lot of the time real incomes are falling artificially. Housing costs for many for example are rising for many because we don't build enough houses. Product costs are rising because we get the courts siding with companies over consumers.
On the first, housing costs there are many people for example that are paying more in rent by a couple of hundred than the mortgage would cost for a similar place in the same area but if you apply for a mortgage you will be told you can't afford that mortgage on your salary.
We have companies producing product x in bangladesh and it costs 100£. They wholesale it to retail in Bangladesh for 130£ and in the uk they wholesale it for 600£ and yet if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them.
if a retailer tries to buy from a wholesaler in bangladesh and sell it for 200£ instead the company will take them to court over it and the court will protect them
Who would they sue? Where would they sue? And what case would they have?
@rcs1000 This is the Tesco Levi's case being referenced is it not?
The most utterly ridiculous case.
That wasn't about Tesco buying jeans from a factory in Bangladesh (which they are free to do). It was about whether Tesco could market Levi jeans that it had grey market imported into the UK. (Therefore benefiting from Levi's marketing budget, without contributing.)
Now, I think the decision was wrong - ultimately grey market imports should be allowed - but it was not about whether a retailer could import and sell jeans from Bangladesh.
Well for one the jeans were sourced in the US if you read the article. Sorry I don't agree at all about the branded bit. An IPhone is an IPhone wherever its sourced same for designer goods. Levi's marketing budget is irrelevant to this and it isn't that Levi's were making a loss on the jeans they merely weren't making as much profit as they wanted to.
Look, I'm in agreement with you that the decision was stupid. But this is a fight over whether companies control their brandname and how their products are sold, not over whether you can import from Bangladesh.
Here in the US, it's illegal (actually go to prison illegal) for a pharmacy to buy drugs from Canada (where wholesale prcies are cheaper) and to sell them. The argument is exactly the same: we created the drug, it's our brand name, you can't benefit the advertising spend if you're not sharing in it by buying it officially.
But that's a very different argument from: supermarkets aren't allowed to buy identical unbranded jeans from Bangladesh (or identical generic drugs from India).
However wrong it is, it's not about your freedom to import, it's about your sale of trademarked goods.
Hey, was just informed that here in WA State, based on my age (mid 60s) and condition (diabetes & hbp) am scheduled to get vaccinated against COVID sometime in March.
How do you think that stacks up with other places? BTW first priority (Jan) are health care workers & other essential, then people over 70 (February) then yours truly. So the priority seems fair enough. But is the timeline reasonably reasonable?
Personally have always been pessimistic re: timetable, so am not stressed (at least not now). BUT do know folks who are, for example friend of mine whose's husband is recovering from lung cancer. Hopefully they won't have to wait two months.
One quibble: I am not sure what impact the changes between 1967 and 1981 have on today's politics.
The point was to show how things had changed between those two periods. Basically from the end of WW2 up to around the start of the 1990s the Middle Classes in America were expanding and becoming wealthier and more secure. This is captured in those numbers for the period 1967 to 1981 which Stephen Rose used to illustrate his point. Failure and slipping back were relatively rare and aspiration was still very much alive.
From 2000 onwards we see a huge change. Incomes fall and social mobility goes into reverse. The American dream effectively starts to die. Even if they don't feel the immediate effects themselves, millions of Americans see it happening all around them and the idea of betterment becomes nothing more than a bitter memory.
I didn't include them because I needed to get verification but there are some figures from 1991 released by the US Department of Labour which estimates that at that point less than 150,000 jobs were offshored by American companies. By 2018 that was, as I mentioned in the piece, over 14 million. Even if there was absolutely no connection between the two, combining that fact with the horribly deteriorating economic situation for many, if not most, Americans, whilst at the same time the political classes are claiming great hikes in GDP and companies are making their shareholders millionaires and their owners billionaires is a sure fire way to foment the sort of anger and rebellion we have seen over the last decade and which led to the election of Trump.
Would an average European now seek to emigrate to America, to secure an average American life?
Would anyone eagerly go from Hamburg to Chicago? Oslo to Ohio? Dublin to Kansas? Lisbon to Detroit? Even from Athens Greece to Athens Georgia?
I don't think so. Outside a top, super-affluent decile of bankers going to NYC, hedge funders to Connecticut, actors to LA, geniuses to Silicon Valley, America is now a less attractive place to live than Europe, and, increasingly, much of Asia.
By going to America you are emigrating to an inferior health system, fewer holidays, worse crime, more guns, a mad political system, and terrible food. The American dream is dead.
For us. It is still immensely attractive to places like central America, Mexico and the Philippines.
Indeed, Which is part of America's problem. It now attracts people from Africa, and LatAm, that many Americans, I fear, would rather not have as immigrants, and the enriching flow of mass immigration from more sophisticated societies has largely stopped.
The many Americans who "fear" Latino & African immigrants, are either racists or idiots. Certainly these newcomers are every bit as "enriching" as the Euro peasants who preceded them from Germany, Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe.
One way that American is different from Western Europe (including obscure off-shore islands) is that, within a generation, immigrants to our shore become . . . Americans.
E pluribus unum!
BTW, one of the more popular leaders of the NBA these days is Athens, Greece native Giannis Antetokounmpo.
It is naive to think that white Americans - still the majority of the nation - are just as welcoming of Nigerian, Honduran or Pakistani immigrants as they are of Irish, Norwegian or Japanese immigrants. The change in the make up of American immigration ("build the wall!") was one of the drivers of Trump's initial victory, and is still an explosive topic in American politics.
But SSIs point that it only takes a generation for immigrants of any skin colour to become American is still valid. And you see it in my daughter's generation. They are much more at ease with multiracial groups, as they've been in them their entire lives.
I do think that part of the Trumpster issue will simply die out with time - even deepest darkest rural America now has large Latino populations who, within a generation, will be walking, talking and dressing like Americans and who will have grown up through school with white American class and sports team mates.
In support of SSI's view, it's always struck me that while a lot of people seem to be aware of race as a dividing line, much more than in Britain, actually most American of all ethnic groups seem more like each other than they do like Brits. I don't mean better or worse, just distinctively different - more extrovert, more hospitable, more religious, more patriotic. Of course it's a generalisation, but it seems to me that many Americans underestimate their similarities and the strength of their culture.
I agree, but I think that is from the eye of the foreign beholder.
When I meet Dutch Javanese, or French Arabs, or Danish Somalians, I am always struck by how Dutch, French or Danish they are. Similarly when my Leicester Gujerati friends have relatives visiting from North America or Australia, it throws a light on how British my friends are.
An overseas observer sees the similarities, a native sees the differences.
Very true. When I lived in Asia was when I realised I was European. As opposed to Caucasian.
Britain arguably does a better job of assimilating most immigrants than America. Remarkably.
I'm scratching my head trying to work out why anyone would think to say such a thing. Struggling to even think what evidence you would look for to say it's true or false.
My best guess is that you just "feel" it's true.
George Floyd died in America, not Swindon
Yes but Floyd was not an immigrant. Indeed his family arrived considerably before Trumps!
Comments
It worked out OK for me.
One way that American is different from Western Europe (including obscure off-shore islands) is that, within a generation, immigrants to our shore become . . . Americans.
E pluribus unum!
BTW, one of the more popular leaders of the NBA these days is Athens, Greece native Giannis Antetokounmpo.
As to high savings rates they require people to live within their means.
But people prefer to live to the style they think they are deserving of.
And governments encourage them to do so because it makes voters happy and so more likely to re-elect governments.
I'd thought of the Uday and Qusay comparison as well.
Taking it further it makes Jared the equivalent of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hussein_Kamel_al-Majid
I hope I have learnt to be sufficiently feline when dealing with authority figures.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaim_Herzog
Some would say it is a price worth paying (for what?); others that this government, or the EU, has ballsed up the negotiations and that a better Brexit settlement was within reach. Some say Brexit was a mistake from the beginning.
This is the Tesco Levi's case being referenced is it not?
The most utterly ridiculous case.
https://twitter.com/dianebutler95/status/1347668381948911618?s=19
I do think that part of the Trumpster issue will simply die out with time - even deepest darkest rural America now has large Latino populations who, within a generation, will be walking, talking and dressing like Americans and who will have grown up through school with white American class and sports team mates.
Perhaps BoZo is right. The reason that we have bad covid figures is that people see the measures as an attack on their freedom.
Britain arguably does a better job of assimilating most immigrants than America. Remarkably.
The absence of guns, on all side - cops and civilians - surely helps. Plus, of course, we do not have the overwhelming historic trauma of massive slavery, on our own soil, and then a terrible civil war that went with it. Even if we did a fair bit of the slave trading, we managed to dodge the psychosis
Unfair, but the case
To say nothing of the Amish. And all the families still clinging to their Irish heritage. I'm sure there are plenty more examples.
Flags, family....whatever next....
"According to the U.S census about 43.8 percent of African immigrants achieved the most college degrees, compared to 42.5 percent of Asian-Americans, 28.9 percent for immigrants from Europe, Russia and Canada and 23.1 percent of the U.S. population as a whole."
But you are correct, they have the wrong pigmentation.
Mind you, I'm thinking the same about Grayling...
Tarrifs incoming...
This is not because Americans are uniquely bad, let alone racist - they are not, they are, in my experience, very tolerant, generous and kind - I suspect the same would happen in any country. Indeed many countries would simply not allow it: India and China spring to mind. And much of Europe. It is a very dangerous thing to attempt. Cf the history of Fiji
But, yeah, they could instead just go for a totally arbitrary date that'd look good on a press release. That's definitely something they could do.
It seemed to spring fully formed out of no where.
That is not the case for India, China and Europe. The only original Americans are the native American Indians
My best guess is that you just "feel" it's true.
Toomey says Trump ‘committed impeachable offenses’
But the Pennsylvania senator said he doesn’t know whether it’s “practical” to move ahead with impeachment proceedings.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/09/pat-toomey-trump-impeachable-offenses-456869
I do NOT agree very often with Senator Toomey, some we're both pretty glad about for the most part.
However, in this instance, I agree with him 100%
Suggest that PBers start looking at the list of Republican elected leaders - elected by the people, not some hack committee - who support Trumpsky after his failed Putsch, and how many oppose him directly, some to the point of calling for his removal ASAP.
With respect to both camps within the GOP, there is a complex interplay between each individual's conviction, circumspection, situation, self-interest and self-respect. For example, at least on paper Governors of Maryland and Vermont to come out against POTUS than say a US Senator (or Congressman or state legislator) from Alabama or West Virginia.
Speaking of the Mountain State, the Putchist who was (newly-elected) Republican member of WV House of Delegates has resigned, as noted down-thred, following his arrest in DC and public condemnation of him by WV Sentators, Governor & fellow GOP legislators including Speaker of HoD. Which I interpret as, them telling him he'd damn well better resign, and if he did they just MIGHT put in a good word for him.
Anyway, pretty standard procedure in cases of legislative scandal, on both side of the aisle. Though charges of sedition & attempted overthrow of US Constitution ARE somewhat novel if not entirely unique in our history.
In Senator Toomey's case, the risk on paper looks low, given that he's in state Biden carried AND is NOT running for re-election. HOWEVER his statement is breath-taking. Note that MOST of the PA House Republicans actively supported the Rudi-Sidney charade of objections, along with Hawley, Cruz, etc. in the Senate.
IF Pat Toomey is NOT conservative enough for you, they you are a TRUE wing-nut. AND your own political base is in SERIOUS jeopardy, enhanced by the longer you fail to recognized their has been a sea change since - or rather because of - the Trumpsky Putsch.
If the purpose is to make distance, then there needs to be change for changes sake. Hence tarrifs incoming.
The news came amid claims from a Conservative MP that the vaccination programme could be held up because it takes up to 15 minutes for each person being vaccinated to sign consent forms to receive a Covid-19 jab.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/09/retireddoctors-still-have-fill-15-forms-take-part-mass-vaccination/
Tbf to Boris, 15 forms (or training courses) does seem to be down from 21.
In your comment you are describing the optimistic America of 20-30 years ago. It would be nice if it were still true. It is not.
Now, I think the decision was wrong - ultimately grey market imports should be allowed - but it was not about whether a retailer could import and sell jeans from Bangladesh.
When I meet Dutch Javanese, or French Arabs, or Danish Somalians, I am always struck by how Dutch, French or Danish they are. Similarly when my Leicester Gujerati friends have relatives visiting from North America or Australia, it throws a light on how British my friends are.
An overseas observer sees the similarities, a native sees the differences.
https://twitter.com/mjs_DC/status/1347395084527017985
It will be extended through to end of June at least is my expectation, due to intense lobbying from MPs.
Pick your time and it's not too crowded most of the time. AND Fred Meyer was good from the first about requesting and requiring masks, for employees and customers, and have stayed that way. As for the employees, don't really know but based on their appearance & demeanor they look reasonably satisfied with their lot AND happy (enough) to still be working.
And they ARE most definitely essential workers. AND running greater risks of catching COVID than many (including me) because they MUST interact with LOTS of people every working day, to some degree and at some proximity.
He is becoming ridiculous.
In Wales -- where SKS seems not have realised Labour are in charge -- "inflation busting" increase have already been announced by Cardiff and Caerffili Councils.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-55592222
Caerffili, a Labour controlled Council since forever, is one of the most corrupt Councils in the UK.
The Council Leader resigned in November following the discovery of the fact that he held shares in a company that benefited from a £38.5 million investment of Caerffili Council funds.
https://tinyurl.com/y554qxee
Maybe if the Valleys Councillors (like Councillor Poole) didn't steal public money, SKS could have his wish.
Rather than berating some poor woman having exercise maybe the government could require supermarkets to enforce social distancing in their stores a bit better. Because while my daughter is leaving takeaways for her customers on a table outside her premises at a preordained time so that there is no interaction at all and then delivering alcohol to other customers, again without any interaction, the local Tesco's the last time I went was an absolute free-for-all.
I won't be going there again for a long long while. My daily walk is my only escape from the house. Indeed, I'd quite welcome some police officer to berate because it'd be nice to see a different human being for a change.
If government wants the strictest possible lockdown it can do that but it will have to pay the cost of that - and it doesn't want to. IMO Sunak is responsible for undermining the government's health strategy by failing to properly support those whose activities need to be temporarily stopped. He never does enough and what he does do is too late.
Eventually he said "You know, I haven't bought a thing for thirty years...." His wife bought EVERYTHING in his life.
Even if someone does walk right past me, cms away, the exposure is for such a short period of time.
Here in the US, it's illegal (actually go to prison illegal) for a pharmacy to buy drugs from Canada (where wholesale prcies are cheaper) and to sell them. The argument is exactly the same: we created the drug, it's our brand name, you can't benefit the advertising spend if you're not sharing in it by buying it officially.
But that's a very different argument from: supermarkets aren't allowed to buy identical unbranded jeans from Bangladesh (or identical generic drugs from India).
However wrong it is, it's not about your freedom to import, it's about your sale of trademarked goods.
How do you think that stacks up with other places? BTW first priority (Jan) are health care workers & other essential, then people over 70 (February) then yours truly. So the priority seems fair enough. But is the timeline reasonably reasonable?
Personally have always been pessimistic re: timetable, so am not stressed (at least not now). BUT do know folks who are, for example friend of mine whose's husband is recovering from lung cancer. Hopefully they won't have to wait two months.