People again talking about infection rates and cases.
Doesn't matter. It's hospitalisations and deaths.
Infection rates and cases gets us to July in lockdown.
It took several months for the message to get across that covid 19 wasnt like the flu.
Sadly it may take another few months for the message to get across that post vaccination covid 19 is a bit like the flu or even a cold if the data on serious illness and death holds up.
My friend who developed symptoms a day or so after his (first) vaccination ten days ago has died. And very few of us have had their second injection. We are by no means out of the wood yet.
That’s very sad and I am sorry for your loss. You have the knowledge and training to know that your friend couldn’t have had time to develop immunity from the injection. I think the evidence will hold that single jab plus 3 weeks does confer at least some protection. Sadly for some they will fall ill before that happens.
That is of course, quite right, and thanks, too, to those who have sympathised. The point I was trying to make is that vaccination in itself isn't the whole of the answer, and that we need to reach a state of 'herd immunity', which will take some time. Opening up, in the sense of returning to what it was like socially in 2019, shouldn't happen for while.
Herd immunity won't be achievable until young adults and little ones are vaccinated, but by vaccinating the most vulnerable first a much bigger reopening should be possible very soon.
You don’t mention the impact of natural infection. Down here in Kent and in London there is, I am virtually certain, a degree of population immunity amongst the most exposed sections of the workforce. Not total herd immunity by any stretch but vaccination puts us closer. Family friends of ours, whole family had symptoms (all fine now), save for their 5 year old. Naive to think he didn’t get it but those young immune systems...
It's true that while eroding R by about 20% below what it would be wouldn't help much at an R of 4 (down to 3.2; hardly slows it) or even 2 (down to 1.6) - when restrictions push it somewhere close to 1, it could actually make all the difference.
From 1.1 to 0.9 helps a hell of a lot. From 1.0 to 0.8, also.
Is it worth reminding people that even before Covid most teachers leaving the profession left for jobs that paid them less than teaching does. From memory the typical pay cut for a teacher willingly leaving the profession is £5k.
And that's for qualified teachers with experience, a lot of people leave during training.
Overseas British private schools 'receiving dozens of applications for every vacancy'.
Giving Topping's viewpoint and that of other none teachers are you surprised? If you are single why would you wish to stay in the UK.
Teaching really is an impossible job this time around - because of the number of children in school most teachers are having to try to do both online and in person teaching at the same time and it's completely impossible.
"completely impossible"
mmkay.
Edit: "other none [sic] teachers".
Oh god you're another one.
Three of you on PB, and on for quite some time, at 09.30 in the morning.
I don't know about elsewhere, but in Romford, it's half term this week.
And the big picture is a really simple example of the free market at work. Schools can't retain staff, and in key subjects they can barely recruit. Something in the pay/conditions/vocation balance is broken. And whilst it's tempting to say that teachers should be more virtuous, there are nowhere near enough paragons to make that work.
Doubly difficult of course for teachers with families to work extra hours.
A significant number of teachers do the job because it fits in well with child care responsibilities. In fact we have a number of pupils who get a lift to school with their teacher parent(s).
Round here the strongest selling point of a job in the local Catholic trust is guaranteed places for your children.
If Starmer is going to channel the spirit of Attlee, he better get cracking.
Not only is he a policy free zone, I don’t even see any evidence that ideological outriders - the left wing think tanks, intellectuals etc - have much interesting to say.
That wasn’t the case for Thatcher, Blair or even Cameron.
It certainly means those (on both sides of the Channel) who were hoping for a "softening" of the agreement are in for a disappointment. I wonder if he will accelerate checks on this side of the Channel?
It certainly means those (on both sides of the Channel) who were hoping for a "softening" of the agreement are in for a disappointment. I wonder if he will accelerate checks on this side of the Channel?
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
How to deal with that level of mindboggling ignorance?
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
Since it took Churchill's 1950s Conservative government two more years to end sugar rationing, perhaps things were a bit more complicated than you make out.
I remember reading George Melly's "Rum, Bum and Concertina" some years ago, which describes his time in the Royal Navy. He says that after the War he was amazed that when when he visited European countries, so many had luxuries like cream cakes when rationing was so strict back in Britain and he wondered why.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
Now, admittedly, some of that was because we had vast coal mines on UK soil and almost a million miners digging it out of the ground, whilst oil was still to some extent undeveloped globally and not wholly secure, but we'd switched the armed forces over decades earlier, road transport was already there and fast overtaking it and, from a manpower point of view, it was extremely inefficient: we had far too many men digging coal, and far too many men firing, driving, steaming, cleaning and operating low HP steam locomotives. There was also the lunacy of the British Railways 1950s modernisation plan which envisaged several massive marshalling yards for old-fashioned goods wagons all over the UK, which was happening just as lorry haulage was changing the nature of freight transport all over the UK. It probably led to us overshooting with Beeching in the 1960s, as we desperately and belatedly tried to staunch the wound and inject a bit of common sense into things (and he definitely did overdo it, and was about as open-minded as Bomber Harris).
We talk about why we were the sick man of Europe going into the 1960s and 1970s.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
It isn't obvious that this has much to do with socialism, with the Conservatives in power during the 1950s. Clinging to the nostalgia of once having been a superpower and empire is closer to the mark; despite the loss of the latter we have never really got real about the former, the massive and pointless expenditure on Trident to this day being a case in point.
It is obvious. Socialists were in power from 1945-1951 when most of those key decisions on nationalising the economy were made, and directing its investment. And don't forget, much as it might pain you to hear this, that Attlee got us into the Korean War and the Malaya Emergency and advocated a "new colonialism" in Africa, focussed on keeping African colonies as strategic Cold War assets while modernising their economies - they thus came under an increased degree of direct control from London. This didn't change until 1957-1958 with Macmillan took over. The best you could say is that Churchill/Eden represented an interregnum which didn't change very much, other than ending rationing and trying to be a bit more sensible on the economy, which is also true.
Attlee was instrumental in developing Britain's nuclear deterrent, and would be shocked to hear your views about Trident - although familiar with them from the left-wing of his party - as he saw it as a necessity to prevent nuclear blackmail, and level the playing field for the UK against other powers with massive and overwhelming conventional armed forces.
At least back then he had the justification that we still felt that we could act independently as a power on the global stage, before the brutal reality checkpoint of Suez. Since Suez the idea that our own nuclear weapons achieve anything separate from the deterrence of the American umbrella is an illusion. Even were the latter to disappear under some Trump redux, there isn't a credible scenario where Trident makes sense, not least because the threats of violence that we face no longer come from conventional military nations.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You think nobody seriously believes China is one of our biggest risks? 🤔
What do you think are our biggest risks ahead of China?
I told you a few days ago and you studiously ignored it.
1. Russia 2. The defence consequences of SINDY 3. Destabilisation in Middle East / NA.
China probably comes after that.
Our defence threats reflect geographic reality and the strength of trade, food and energy flows.
Not flat earth fantasy.
You're in so far in de Nile you're walking like an Egyptian.
China are the world's number one long term threat - and as a country in the world they are our number one long term threat too.
Russia are piddly bit players. Russia to China is like England/the UK to the USA. Russia used to be a superpower, they're not anymore, they're just playing at it nowadays.
The consequences of Sindy need to be dealt with but we'll get over that one way or another, its not that consequential for dealing with our enemies.
The Middle East we're still dealing with but its not as significant as China.
China are the new evil empire, they're every bit as much a threat as the USSR was. If you deny that you're not big or clever, you're just showing how little attention you're paying.
So Russia is not a threat, the Middle East “we are dealing with”, and I am trying to “big and clever” to suggest otherwise?
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
Now, admittedly, some of that was because we had vast coal mines on UK soil and almost a million miners digging it out of the ground, whilst oil was still to some extent undeveloped globally and not wholly secure, but we'd switched the armed forces over decades earlier, road transport was already there and fast overtaking it and, from a manpower point of view, it was extremely inefficient: we had far too many men digging coal, and far too many men firing, driving, steaming, cleaning and operating low HP steam locomotives. There was also the lunacy of the British Railways 1950s modernisation plan which envisaged several massive marshalling yards for old-fashioned goods wagons all over the UK, which was happening just as lorry haulage was changing the nature of freight transport all over the UK. It probably led to us overshooting with Beeching in the 1960s, as we desperately and belatedly tried to staunch the wound and inject a bit of common sense into things (and he definitely did overdo it, and was about as open-minded as Bomber Harris).
We talk about why we were the sick man of Europe going into the 1960s and 1970s.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
As I said before hindsight is a wonderful thing and trying to avoid Diesel made perfect sense given that at the time we needed to import it but we didn't need to import coal.
Beeching literally did what he was asked to do - yes he probably cut too much but the requirements created a criteria that left him with little choice. Especially as by then it was obvious that road was the future for both freight and public transport.
Of course it is. You're absolutely right. Hindsight makes wise men of us all. But, I doubt I'd have been arguing for socialism at the time, and neither were many leading Conservatives, and all these points were made then - but, by the time the 1950s came round, they felt it was simply the price of post-war democracy.
Beeching, hmm. I'm often tried to be sympathetic to him. The trouble is he was so dogmatic. He was interviewed again in the early 1980s, before he died, and the main regret he seemed to have was that he didn't go further, including closing the ECML between Newcastle and Edinburgh on the basis that it would only inconvenience Berwick-upon-Tweed and the WCML was sufficient. He wanted to only prioritise 3,000 miles for investment of the over 10,000 miles we have today.
He didn't take into account anything but raw commercial profitability of a line. There was no Treasury Green Book analysis of RoI for the wider or local economy, nor the displacement costs of maintenance or congestion onto the roads, and the savings he actually achieved in the end were very modest. So, I think he was actually rather an unimaginative and dogmatic man, and entirely unrepentant even with the benefit of 20 years hindsight - which is when I'd expect someone reflective to acknowledge what they got wrong.
I think he overclosed about 1,000-2,000 route miles, failed to recommend general operational economies on the balance of the retained network, and the omission on recommendations of how to handle of land disposals post closure was grossly irresponsible - and it directly inhibits feasible reopenings today.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Baldwin's need to appease Tory imperialists like Churchill made such a thing utterly impossible.
Churchill was largely in the wilderness in those years, and broadly ignored.
The story of India is that it got each level of progressive self-government and reform about 20 years later than it should have done, when compared to the other dominions, and then only to about 60-70% of the level that it should have done.
I think had it moved on a similar trajectory to Australia and Canada, provincial and local self-government in the 1850s and 1860s, and broader home rule by the 1880s and 1890s, with full dominion status in the 1920s and 1930s, then we'd have had a much more positive long-term relationship over the last 60-70 years with India as a close ally throughout, which would have helped immeasurably with the Cold War, and it might be an influential member of a far more powerful "Six Eyes" today.
It's a nice piece of alternate history, but given contemporary British attitudes, none of that was remotely possible.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You think nobody seriously believes China is one of our biggest risks? 🤔
What do you think are our biggest risks ahead of China?
I told you a few days ago and you studiously ignored it.
1. Russia 2. The defence consequences of SINDY 3. Destabilisation in Middle East / NA.
China probably comes after that.
Our defence threats reflect geographic reality and the strength of trade, food and energy flows.
Not flat earth fantasy.
You're in so far in de Nile you're walking like an Egyptian.
China are the world's number one long term threat - and as a country in the world they are our number one long term threat too.
Russia are piddly bit players. Russia to China is like England/the UK to the USA. Russia used to be a superpower, they're not anymore, they're just playing at it nowadays.
The consequences of Sindy need to be dealt with but we'll get over that one way or another, its not that consequential for dealing with our enemies.
The Middle East we're still dealing with but its not as significant as China.
China are the new evil empire, they're every bit as much a threat as the USSR was. If you deny that you're not big or clever, you're just showing how little attention you're paying.
So Russia is not a threat, the Middle East “we are dealing with”, and I am trying to “big and clever” to suggest otherwise?
It’s a view.
Russia is a threat, but a minor one compared to China. Absolutely, 100%.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
Now, admittedly, some of that was because we had vast coal mines on UK soil and almost a million miners digging it out of the ground, whilst oil was still to some extent undeveloped globally and not wholly secure, but we'd switched the armed forces over decades earlier, road transport was already there and fast overtaking it and, from a manpower point of view, it was extremely inefficient: we had far too many men digging coal, and far too many men firing, driving, steaming, cleaning and operating low HP steam locomotives. There was also the lunacy of the British Railways 1950s modernisation plan which envisaged several massive marshalling yards for old-fashioned goods wagons all over the UK, which was happening just as lorry haulage was changing the nature of freight transport all over the UK. It probably led to us overshooting with Beeching in the 1960s, as we desperately and belatedly tried to staunch the wound and inject a bit of common sense into things (and he definitely did overdo it, and was about as open-minded as Bomber Harris).
We talk about why we were the sick man of Europe going into the 1960s and 1970s.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
It isn't obvious that this has much to do with socialism, with the Conservatives in power during the 1950s. Clinging to the nostalgia of once having been a superpower and empire is closer to the mark; despite the loss of the latter we have never really got real about the former, the massive and pointless expenditure on Trident to this day being a case in point.
It is obvious. Socialists were in power from 1945-1951 when most of those key decisions on nationalising the economy were made, and directing its investment. And don't forget, much as it might pain you to hear this, that Attlee got us into the Korean War and the Malaya Emergency and advocated a "new colonialism" in Africa, focussed on keeping African colonies as strategic Cold War assets while modernising their economies - they thus came under an increased degree of direct control from London. This didn't change until 1957-1958 with Macmillan took over. The best you could say is that Churchill/Eden represented an interregnum which didn't change very much, other than ending rationing and trying to be a bit more sensible on the economy, which is also true.
Attlee was instrumental in developing Britain's nuclear deterrent, and would be shocked to hear your views about Trident - although familiar with them from the left-wing of his party - as he saw it as a necessity to prevent nuclear blackmail, and level the playing field for the UK against other powers with massive and overwhelming conventional armed forces.
At least back then he had the justification that we still felt that we could act independently as a power on the global stage, before the brutal reality checkpoint of Suez. Since Suez the idea that our own nuclear weapons achieve anything separate from the deterrence of the American umbrella is an illusion. Even were the latter to disappear under some Trump redux, there isn't a credible scenario where Trident makes sense, not least because the threats of violence that we face no longer come from conventional military nations.
The writing was on the wall well before Suez. It's just no-one wanted to face up to it.
I disagree with you on Trident. It prevents nuclear blackmail by rogue states or groups, and also a scenario where a major prospective enemy calculates they can directly threaten Britain unilaterally without inviting an American response.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
How to deal with that level of mindboggling ignorance?
PB Brexiters love to talk about deploying their divisions (how many do they have?) into the Far East because it fits their ideology that Europe - ie the continent we live in - can be ignored.
It’s sheer fantasy, and does not bode well for the U.K.’s future prosperity which has to be based on the world as it is.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
How to deal with that level of mindboggling ignorance?
PB Brexiters love to talk about deploying their divisions (how many do they have?) into the Far East because it fits their ideology that Europe - ie the continent we live in - can be ignored.
It’s sheer fantasy, and does not bode well for the U.K.’s future prosperity which has to be based on the world as it is.
The world as it is is a single planet where any part of the planet can be accessed from any other part of the planet.
Which western European country are we more likely to risk armed conflict with over China?
People again talking about infection rates and cases.
Doesn't matter. It's hospitalisations and deaths.
Infection rates and cases gets us to July in lockdown.
It took several months for the message to get across that covid 19 wasnt like the flu.
Sadly it may take another few months for the message to get across that post vaccination covid 19 is a bit like the flu or even a cold if the data on serious illness and death holds up.
My friend who developed symptoms a day or so after his (first) vaccination ten days ago has died. And very few of us have had their second injection. We are by no means out of the wood yet.
These cases are particuarly tragic - like returning soldiers who die slow deaths from old wounds - it is why the slow vaccine rollout here in Spain makes me and many others so anxious. Frustrating as the country has everything in place for half a million doses a week - except for the doses themselves!
everything in place for half a million doses a week</>
Do you have some more info you can share? - not seen very much about preparations for mass vaccination in European countries, to date.
I didn't keep the link but yesterday The man in charge of health in the Junta de Andalucia gave an interview in which he outlined the capacity for delivery in place - with venues for mass vaccinations. However, he added that we were reliant solely now on central government delivering the vaccines. He said it was hoped for bigger supplies in March or April. If it happens , great but no-one is holding their breath. Also in Spain, Pfizer and Modena are reserved for 60+ and those with health issues. AZN for the younger. They also follow rigidly the 2 doses in 1 month regime - which will add unnecessary delays to protecting the maximum number of people.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
Yes I do realise that.
But unless you can convince me that computer chips are more strategically important than food, energy, and the great preponderance of our trade, I’m not going to put it up there as our #1 issue.
ALL democratic countries have an interest in avoiding a Chinese invasion of Taiwan of course.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Baldwin's need to appease Tory imperialists like Churchill made such a thing utterly impossible.
Churchill was largely in the wilderness in those years, and broadly ignored.
The story of India is that it got each level of progressive self-government and reform about 20 years later than it should have done, when compared to the other dominions, and then only to about 60-70% of the level that it should have done.
I think had it moved on a similar trajectory to Australia and Canada, provincial and local self-government in the 1850s and 1860s, and broader home rule by the 1880s and 1890s, with full dominion status in the 1920s and 1930s, then we'd have had a much more positive long-term relationship over the last 60-70 years with India as a close ally throughout, which would have helped immeasurably with the Cold War, and it might be an influential member of a far more powerful "Six Eyes" today.
India, or the various bits of it, had a very high degree of self-government before the East India Company showed up.
And of course some of that self-government (the princely states) were not at all enthusiastic for the idea of a government of the whole of India.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
What do you think the UK would do if China did invade Taiwan? I'd guess at absolutely nothing.
Which is why prevention is better than cure.
The USA and friends like the UK, Singapore, South Korea and many more projecting their strength around Taiwan is more likely to deter China from invading in the first place.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
How to deal with that level of mindboggling ignorance?
PB Brexiters love to talk about deploying their divisions (how many do they have?) into the Far East because it fits their ideology that Europe - ie the continent we live in - can be ignored.
It’s sheer fantasy, and does not bode well for the U.K.’s future prosperity which has to be based on the world as it is.
The world as it is is a single planet where any part of the planet can be accessed from any other part of the planet.
Which western European country are we more likely to risk armed conflict with over China?
Russia routinely sends its subs and planes into “Western European” seas and airspace.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Baldwin's need to appease Tory imperialists like Churchill made such a thing utterly impossible.
Churchill was largely in the wilderness in those years, and broadly ignored.
The story of India is that it got each level of progressive self-government and reform about 20 years later than it should have done, when compared to the other dominions, and then only to about 60-70% of the level that it should have done.
I think had it moved on a similar trajectory to Australia and Canada, provincial and local self-government in the 1850s and 1860s, and broader home rule by the 1880s and 1890s, with full dominion status in the 1920s and 1930s, then we'd have had a much more positive long-term relationship over the last 60-70 years with India as a close ally throughout, which would have helped immeasurably with the Cold War, and it might be an influential member of a far more powerful "Six Eyes" today.
It is simplifying only slightly to say that Churchill was wrong about pretty much everything over his long political career, except the threat from the Nazis.
That's a huge oversimplification. Churchill was a romantic Victorian imperialist, and held over those attitudes from the 1880s and 1890s for far too long, but he also gave some of the most powerful insights into human nature ever made, and championed a number of important social and economic reforms. He was utterly instrumental to the post-war democratic settlement, intelligently critiquing absolutism, dictatorship and communism - and butchering their arguments brilliantly.
If he had a weakness it was his emotional and erratic personality, which became a strength in WWII, of course.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
Now, admittedly, some of that was because we had vast coal mines on UK soil and almost a million miners digging it out of the ground, whilst oil was still to some extent undeveloped globally and not wholly secure, but we'd switched the armed forces over decades earlier, road transport was already there and fast overtaking it and, from a manpower point of view, it was extremely inefficient: we had far too many men digging coal, and far too many men firing, driving, steaming, cleaning and operating low HP steam locomotives. There was also the lunacy of the British Railways 1950s modernisation plan which envisaged several massive marshalling yards for old-fashioned goods wagons all over the UK, which was happening just as lorry haulage was changing the nature of freight transport all over the UK. It probably led to us overshooting with Beeching in the 1960s, as we desperately and belatedly tried to staunch the wound and inject a bit of common sense into things (and he definitely did overdo it, and was about as open-minded as Bomber Harris).
We talk about why we were the sick man of Europe going into the 1960s and 1970s.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
It isn't obvious that this has much to do with socialism, with the Conservatives in power during the 1950s. Clinging to the nostalgia of once having been a superpower and empire is closer to the mark; despite the loss of the latter we have never really got real about the former, the massive and pointless expenditure on Trident to this day being a case in point.
It is obvious. Socialists were in power from 1945-1951 when most of those key decisions on nationalising the economy were made, and directing its investment. And don't forget, much as it might pain you to hear this, that Attlee got us into the Korean War and the Malaya Emergency and advocated a "new colonialism" in Africa, focussed on keeping African colonies as strategic Cold War assets while modernising their economies - they thus came under an increased degree of direct control from London. This didn't change until 1957-1958 with Macmillan took over. The best you could say is that Churchill/Eden represented an interregnum which didn't change very much, other than ending rationing and trying to be a bit more sensible on the economy, which is also true.
Attlee was instrumental in developing Britain's nuclear deterrent, and would be shocked to hear your views about Trident - although familiar with them from the left-wing of his party - as he saw it as a necessity to prevent nuclear blackmail, and level the playing field for the UK against other powers with massive and overwhelming conventional armed forces.
At least back then he had the justification that we still felt that we could act independently as a power on the global stage, before the brutal reality checkpoint of Suez. Since Suez the idea that our own nuclear weapons achieve anything separate from the deterrence of the American umbrella is an illusion. Even were the latter to disappear under some Trump redux, there isn't a credible scenario where Trident makes sense, not least because the threats of violence that we face no longer come from conventional military nations.
The writing was on the wall well before Suez. It's just no-one wanted to face up to it.
I disagree with you on Trident. It prevents nuclear blackmail by rogue states or groups, and also a scenario where a major prospective enemy calculates they can directly threaten Britain unilaterally without inviting an American response.
They are complimentary assets.
We have not been a superpower since Attlee gave India independence. Morally he may have been right to do so but Churchill was our last leader of global significance there is no doubt about that. By the time Eden was PM we could not act independently outside of our territory without co ordinating with the US first, even with French support.
I agree on Trident, as long as Putin, Xi and Kim Jong Un and potentially Iran have nuclear weapons, so should we
Pension Figures From China's Hubei Spark Doubts Over Virus Deaths
Chinese government figures showing the absence of more than 150,000 elderly people from the list of those given state subsidy payments in the first quarter of 2020 could point to a far greater COVID-19-linked death toll than previously reported in the country, analysts told RFA.
Data released by the civil affairs department in the central province of Hubei, where the coronavirus pandemic first emerged in December 2019, showed that around 150,000 names had "disappeared" from the list of recipients in the first three months of 2020, as COVID-19 tore through the provincial capital Wuhan and surrounding areas, sparking a provincial lockdown.
The subsidy is a payment handed out to people over 80 across the province who are experiencing financial hardship.
Transparency campaigner Liu Jun, who has previously suggested that the true death toll from the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic could be several times higher than the 4,636 reported by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP), said the figure suggested a very high death toll.
It was always difficult to believe that the Chinese death toll reached around 4,000 in April and then didnt increase at all for many months.
No one believes the official estimate, the question is how much higher the true figure is. Even 100,000 would imply a similar death rate to the UK - Hubei has ~61m people.
I think earlier estimates of 40,000 are closer to the truth - the Chinese crackdown may have been too late, but I am sure it got the job done.
They all have a matter of weeks (one or two months, if they're lucky) before China are onto this and nail their shackles to the floor for good.
I'd tell all BNO passport holders to apply now, and slip out via multiple routes on multiple pretexts as soon as the Rona restrictions allow - and before if they can.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You think nobody seriously believes China is one of our biggest risks? 🤔
What do you think are our biggest risks ahead of China?
I told you a few days ago and you studiously ignored it.
1. Russia 2. The defence consequences of SINDY 3. Destabilisation in Middle East / NA.
China probably comes after that.
Our defence threats reflect geographic reality and the strength of trade, food and energy flows.
Not flat earth fantasy.
You're in so far in de Nile you're walking like an Egyptian.
China are the world's number one long term threat - and as a country in the world they are our number one long term threat too.
Russia are piddly bit players. Russia to China is like England/the UK to the USA. Russia used to be a superpower, they're not anymore, they're just playing at it nowadays.
The consequences of Sindy need to be dealt with but we'll get over that one way or another, its not that consequential for dealing with our enemies.
The Middle East we're still dealing with but its not as significant as China.
China are the new evil empire, they're every bit as much a threat as the USSR was. If you deny that you're not big or clever, you're just showing how little attention you're paying.
Realistically now Hong Kong is no longer a British colony we will not do anything about China, even if they invade Taiwan, unless the US has done something first
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
Yes I do realise that.
But unless you can convince me that computer chips are more strategically important than food, energy, and the great preponderance of our trade, I’m not going to put it up there as our #1 issue.
ALL democratic countries have an interest in avoiding a Chinese invasion of Taiwan of course.
But we are not at the front of the queue.
The UK is not at risk of strategically losing food, energy, trade or anything else. You think Russia are going to be able to cut our food and energy off? How?
We're not at the front of the queue in avoiding a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. We are a part of an alliance doing that though and working together with our allies to prevent it. If China invaded Taiwan and said they were refusing to supply chips to the western world then we would be devastated economically far more than anything that could happen from Brexit, Sindy or any other petty trivial distracitons like that.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Baldwin's need to appease Tory imperialists like Churchill made such a thing utterly impossible.
Churchill was largely in the wilderness in those years, and broadly ignored.
The story of India is that it got each level of progressive self-government and reform about 20 years later than it should have done, when compared to the other dominions, and then only to about 60-70% of the level that it should have done.
I think had it moved on a similar trajectory to Australia and Canada, provincial and local self-government in the 1850s and 1860s, and broader home rule by the 1880s and 1890s, with full dominion status in the 1920s and 1930s, then we'd have had a much more positive long-term relationship over the last 60-70 years with India as a close ally throughout, which would have helped immeasurably with the Cold War, and it might be an influential member of a far more powerful "Six Eyes" today.
It is simplifying only slightly to say that Churchill was wrong about pretty much everything over his long political career, except the threat from the Nazis.
That's a huge oversimplification. Churchill was a romantic Victorian imperialist, and held over those attitudes from the 1880s and 1890s for far too long, but he also gave some of the most powerful insights into human nature ever made, and championed a number of important social and economic reforms. He was utterly instrumental to the post-war democratic settlement, intelligently critiquing absolutism, dictatorship and communism - and butchering their arguments brilliantly.
If he had a weakness it was his emotional and erratic personality, which became a strength in WWII, of course.
A fair point on communism. If you broaden my point to encompass the threat from totalitarianism, I think it stands.
As an aside, he once sent a destroyer to deal with a strike in Liverpool, I believe.
As a further aside, had WWII been fought as he wanted rather than as the Americans, it would have lasted years longer.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
How to deal with that level of mindboggling ignorance?
PB Brexiters love to talk about deploying their divisions (how many do they have?) into the Far East because it fits their ideology that Europe - ie the continent we live in - can be ignored.
It’s sheer fantasy, and does not bode well for the U.K.’s future prosperity which has to be based on the world as it is.
The world as it is is a single planet where any part of the planet can be accessed from any other part of the planet.
Which western European country are we more likely to risk armed conflict with over China?
Russia routinely sends its subs and planes into “Western European” seas and airspace.
Just as we sent ours to Asia.
As I said, they're like us. Still relevant but shades of their former selves.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You think nobody seriously believes China is one of our biggest risks? 🤔
What do you think are our biggest risks ahead of China?
I told you a few days ago and you studiously ignored it.
1. Russia 2. The defence consequences of SINDY 3. Destabilisation in Middle East / NA.
China probably comes after that.
Our defence threats reflect geographic reality and the strength of trade, food and energy flows.
Not flat earth fantasy.
You're in so far in de Nile you're walking like an Egyptian.
China are the world's number one long term threat - and as a country in the world they are our number one long term threat too.
Russia are piddly bit players. Russia to China is like England/the UK to the USA. Russia used to be a superpower, they're not anymore, they're just playing at it nowadays.
The consequences of Sindy need to be dealt with but we'll get over that one way or another, its not that consequential for dealing with our enemies.
The Middle East we're still dealing with but its not as significant as China.
China are the new evil empire, they're every bit as much a threat as the USSR was. If you deny that you're not big or clever, you're just showing how little attention you're paying.
Realistically now Hong Kong is no longer a British colony we will not do anything about China, even if they invade Taiwan, unless the US has done something first
That's the whole point of the alliance. We're working with Biden, with the USA. We're not acting unilaterally.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
How to deal with that level of mindboggling ignorance?
PB Brexiters love to talk about deploying their divisions (how many do they have?) into the Far East because it fits their ideology that Europe - ie the continent we live in - can be ignored.
It’s sheer fantasy, and does not bode well for the U.K.’s future prosperity which has to be based on the world as it is.
That might well be true, but your insouciance about the strategic threat is equally silly.
The Plan will talk about Stages. Not tiers or levels as they have been used before.
Stage 1 (8 March) - primary schools open, secondary schools maybe 15 March with enhanced testing. Limited social meeting outside allowed.
Stage 2 (29 March) - non essential retail opens.
Stage 3 (26 April) - pubs restaurants and hotels open. Inside and out. Maximum of two households mixing. Contact details required, mandatory table service, masks when moving around. No curfew or substantial meal. Domestic holidays allowed including going to holiday homes. One metre plus social distancing in operation.
Stage 4 (31 May) - opening of outdoor sporting areas with capacity restricted eg cricket.
Later (1 September) - subject to vaccine progress, return to near normal domestically.
It has even been suggested that several very senior figures at the DfE are fed up with homeschooling their own less than pleasant children
What is becoming quite clear is that one of the worse outcomes for children would be to find themselves as one of your pupils.
Well, we’re even mate, because I’ve found myself feeling really sorry for any poor sod who served under your command given how unpleasant and selfish you’ve shown yourself to be.
Selfish. From the teacher who doesn't want to spend an extra few days helping his pupils.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of my army career I've mentioned none of it. You meanwhile have told us a lot about how you approach the teaching profession.
You're in the wrong job.
As I have repeatedly told you, I have spent many extra days helping people. And I have worked in extension lessons, after school and in holidays, doing just that.
So that makes you a liar as well as a fool.
What I object to is having it imposed by diktat to protect the careers of your fellow thick poshos.
When you apologise for lying to me and about me, I’ll engage with you again.
Until then - fuck off.
OH NO. NOT ENGAGING.
I'll manage.
Flounce all you want, petal. You didn't want to go the extra mile because Union/DfE whatever. You have to live with that, not me. Oh and your pupils, heaven help them. I hope you don't think too many of them are less than pleasant also.
You really are an arse of the highest order.
As with a lot of people here I suspect were you asked by your employer to drop a planned holiday you would be telling them where to go.
Actually you are probably someone who would thank them for the opportunity while you wife started divorce proceedings.
Thank you for your contribution.
I am not a teacher. A teacher has imo a special duty to his or her charges. I would not work for my employer for free because there aren't several dozen children relying on me for their education and development in this, the most peculiar of times. But for a teacher that is different.
Where you, and evidently ydoer3rfahwer go wrong is in conflating working for The Man (which I do) and working in education at the sharp end.
He would far rather it seems be working for The Man, when all his barbs would be relevant.
Plus he labelled the children of some DfE officials (whom he doesn't know, I'll wager) "less than pleasant". The children, not the DfE officials. He is 100% in the wrong job.
As I'm sure he would admit if he were to engage with me.
I jokingly said that maybe teachers should take an oath on becoming one same as doctors do. I'm not sure there is the same level of commitment for teachers and I'm also not sure they get paid enough for such an attitude to hold. Simply, we as a society don't value teachers very much and this is the result. I think the fault is ours.
We do have professional standards, set by the DfE, which amount to the same thing as an oath. Although they are written by non-teachers and the profession is regulated by civil servants, unlike the GMC. That has drawbacks and advantages which I won’t bother going into as it’s a long essay.
I think however your last but one sentence is spot on.
The GTC regulated teachers from 2000 to 2012 I believe, now its functions handled by the Teaching Regulation Agency within the Department for Education
I find myself in the extraordinary position of agreeing more with the PM than with many/most on here. People keep talking about dates. I thought that there was general agreement (with the PM) that the easing of restrictions should be governed by data (especially deaths and hospitalisations) rather than dates.
And yet, here we are, with large numbers of (lagged) deaths still occurring, and significant hospitalisations, still going on about "must be by the end of April" etc. The impact of vaccinations should feed into the data, not the date, for loosening restrictions.
If you stick to the 'data not dates' message, gradual reopening could be any time between about a month from now and three months, surely? Maybe once deaths are down to less than 100 a day on average, and hospitalisations are way down, restrictions can be eased. That could be in March, or April/May/June. Surely we can't repeat the error of promulgating another wave by opening too soon?
This is pretty much my take too.
As it happens I think the government are going to go a bit slower than they need to but it's only on the margins and given the uncertainties, the previous history of overconfidence and underestimation of the virus, and the calculus of health and political and economic risk, I don't blame them one iota for that.
The fact is, in the grand scheme of things with this pandemic, and given all we have gone through to this point, if we are out of this (and for good) by June July time, that is a result.
If we truly were looking at being "locked up till July" I would be joining the chorus of "c'mon that's ridiculous!" but we are not. That's tabloid tosh. The plan is a gradual return to normality, starting 8th March with schools, followed by restrictions being lifted gradually over the spring until by summer it's go buddy go.
I'm happy with that. If Johnson offered that to me now (with a guarantee thrown in) I would bite his hand off. The main concern is not a few weeks here and there on the reopening timetable but the possibility of something surprising and unpleasant from the virus which takes us backwards again. That's a worry. What I don't worry about is that the government's understandable caution at this crux point will morph into a determination to keep society in the deep freeze to infinity and beyond. That smacks of paranoia to me. Paranoia that, by a certain dark irony, is probably fed by being in lockdown.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Baldwin's need to appease Tory imperialists like Churchill made such a thing utterly impossible.
Churchill was largely in the wilderness in those years, and broadly ignored.
The story of India is that it got each level of progressive self-government and reform about 20 years later than it should have done, when compared to the other dominions, and then only to about 60-70% of the level that it should have done.
I think had it moved on a similar trajectory to Australia and Canada, provincial and local self-government in the 1850s and 1860s, and broader home rule by the 1880s and 1890s, with full dominion status in the 1920s and 1930s, then we'd have had a much more positive long-term relationship over the last 60-70 years with India as a close ally throughout, which would have helped immeasurably with the Cold War, and it might be an influential member of a far more powerful "Six Eyes" today.
It's a nice piece of alternate history, but given contemporary British attitudes, none of that was remotely possible.
I think much of it is, and there was certainly debate on it at the time - just as Home Rule for Ireland was first proposed by Gladstone in the 1880s, but never happened, by which time it was too late - here's a debate on it in 1929:
I wouldn't land it all at the door of unenlightened British attitudes, either - I think that's too simplistic: we are all products of our times, with a only a visionary few able to see how things can be different, and why, and you need to factor in the geopolitical context, and broader realpolitik constraints of the times too, which aren't the same as our constraints and context today.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Baldwin's need to appease Tory imperialists like Churchill made such a thing utterly impossible.
Churchill was largely in the wilderness in those years, and broadly ignored.
The story of India is that it got each level of progressive self-government and reform about 20 years later than it should have done, when compared to the other dominions, and then only to about 60-70% of the level that it should have done.
I think had it moved on a similar trajectory to Australia and Canada, provincial and local self-government in the 1850s and 1860s, and broader home rule by the 1880s and 1890s, with full dominion status in the 1920s and 1930s, then we'd have had a much more positive long-term relationship over the last 60-70 years with India as a close ally throughout, which would have helped immeasurably with the Cold War, and it might be an influential member of a far more powerful "Six Eyes" today.
It is simplifying only slightly to say that Churchill was wrong about pretty much everything over his long political career, except the threat from the Nazis.
That's a huge oversimplification. Churchill was a romantic Victorian imperialist, and held over those attitudes from the 1880s and 1890s for far too long, but he also gave some of the most powerful insights into human nature ever made, and championed a number of important social and economic reforms. He was utterly instrumental to the post-war democratic settlement, intelligently critiquing absolutism, dictatorship and communism - and butchering their arguments brilliantly.
If he had a weakness it was his emotional and erratic personality, which became a strength in WWII, of course.
A fair point on communism. If you broaden my point to encompass the threat from totalitarianism, I think it stands.
As an aside, he once sent a destroyer to deal with a strike in Liverpool, I believe.
As a further aside, had WWII been fought as he wanted rather than as the Americans, it would have lasted years longer.
Yes, he was a bit too "imaginative" on the military front, and sometimes a bit too keen on it too.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Baldwin's need to appease Tory imperialists like Churchill made such a thing utterly impossible.
Churchill was largely in the wilderness in those years, and broadly ignored.
The story of India is that it got each level of progressive self-government and reform about 20 years later than it should have done, when compared to the other dominions, and then only to about 60-70% of the level that it should have done.
I think had it moved on a similar trajectory to Australia and Canada, provincial and local self-government in the 1850s and 1860s, and broader home rule by the 1880s and 1890s, with full dominion status in the 1920s and 1930s, then we'd have had a much more positive long-term relationship over the last 60-70 years with India as a close ally throughout, which would have helped immeasurably with the Cold War, and it might be an influential member of a far more powerful "Six Eyes" today.
It is simplifying only slightly to say that Churchill was wrong about pretty much everything over his long political career, except the threat from the Nazis.
That's a huge oversimplification. Churchill was a romantic Victorian imperialist, and held over those attitudes from the 1880s and 1890s for far too long, but he also gave some of the most powerful insights into human nature ever made, and championed a number of important social and economic reforms. He was utterly instrumental to the post-war democratic settlement, intelligently critiquing absolutism, dictatorship and communism - and butchering their arguments brilliantly.
If he had a weakness it was his emotional and erratic personality, which became a strength in WWII, of course.
A fair point on communism. If you broaden my point to encompass the threat from totalitarianism, I think it stands.
As an aside, he once sent a destroyer to deal with a strike in Liverpool, I believe.
As a further aside, had WWII been fought as he wanted rather than as the Americans, it would have lasted years longer.
Churchill also introduced National Insurance for healthcare and unemployment benefit.
Had Britain fallen in 1940 of course then Moscow would likely have fallen to the Nazis by winter 1940
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
How to deal with that level of mindboggling ignorance?
PB Brexiters love to talk about deploying their divisions (how many do they have?) into the Far East because it fits their ideology that Europe - ie the continent we live in - can be ignored.
It’s sheer fantasy, and does not bode well for the U.K.’s future prosperity which has to be based on the world as it is.
The world as it is is a single planet where any part of the planet can be accessed from any other part of the planet.
Which western European country are we more likely to risk armed conflict with over China?
Russia routinely sends its subs and planes into “Western European” seas and airspace.
Just as we sent ours to Asia.
As I said, they're like us. Still relevant but shades of their former selves.
Lot further to Asia for us though. And what is Russia to do if it wants to strengthen..... or weaken .... it's fleet in Black Sea? Send it's warships up the Volga?
And yes I know the Russian ships are probably not 'just passing'!
My view is simple: I see Russia as a serious but containable threat and China as a potentially uncontainable threat, unless we take additional concerted action now.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
How to deal with that level of mindboggling ignorance?
PB Brexiters love to talk about deploying their divisions (how many do they have?) into the Far East because it fits their ideology that Europe - ie the continent we live in - can be ignored.
It’s sheer fantasy, and does not bode well for the U.K.’s future prosperity which has to be based on the world as it is.
That might well be true, but your insouciance about the strategic threat is equally silly.
I didn’t have you down as a Brexity idiot, but I guess you must be.
I’m not insouciant.
I am reminding the PB Brexit incel group-thinkers that obsessing over China and military deployments to the Far East is not a substitute for a defence strategy.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Baldwin's need to appease Tory imperialists like Churchill made such a thing utterly impossible.
Churchill was largely in the wilderness in those years, and broadly ignored.
The story of India is that it got each level of progressive self-government and reform about 20 years later than it should have done, when compared to the other dominions, and then only to about 60-70% of the level that it should have done.
I think had it moved on a similar trajectory to Australia and Canada, provincial and local self-government in the 1850s and 1860s, and broader home rule by the 1880s and 1890s, with full dominion status in the 1920s and 1930s, then we'd have had a much more positive long-term relationship over the last 60-70 years with India as a close ally throughout, which would have helped immeasurably with the Cold War, and it might be an influential member of a far more powerful "Six Eyes" today.
It is simplifying only slightly to say that Churchill was wrong about pretty much everything over his long political career, except the threat from the Nazis.
That's a huge oversimplification. Churchill was a romantic Victorian imperialist, and held over those attitudes from the 1880s and 1890s for far too long, but he also gave some of the most powerful insights into human nature ever made, and championed a number of important social and economic reforms. He was utterly instrumental to the post-war democratic settlement, intelligently critiquing absolutism, dictatorship and communism - and butchering their arguments brilliantly.
If he had a weakness it was his emotional and erratic personality, which became a strength in WWII, of course.
A fair point on communism. If you broaden my point to encompass the threat from totalitarianism, I think it stands.
As an aside, he once sent a destroyer to deal with a strike in Liverpool, I believe.
As a further aside, had WWII been fought as he wanted rather than as the Americans, it would have lasted years longer.
Churchill also introduced National Insurance for healthcare and unemployment benefit.
Had Britain fallen in 1940 of course then Moscow would likely have fallen to the Nazis by winter 1940
Maybe by 1941, there was never going to be a Russian front in 1940.
It certainly means those (on both sides of the Channel) who were hoping for a "softening" of the agreement are in for a disappointment. I wonder if he will accelerate checks on this side of the Channel?
Reciprocity should be key.
I agree with that but we should approach the matter constructively rather than in a mercantilist fashion looking for some small advantage. There will be enough of that from the French to be going on with.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
What do you think the UK would do if China did invade Taiwan? I'd guess at absolutely nothing.
Sanctions, resolutions in UN (vetoed of course), very probably nothing else unless the US was involved in the defence.
Oh, and pray that the Queen Elizabeth is not in range of missiles yet.
China if it invaded Taiwan and the US had not already taken military action in response would not target a UK aircraft carrier as that would be an attack on a NATO member which would guarantee a US response as well as from the UK
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
Yes I do realise that.
But unless you can convince me that computer chips are more strategically important than food, energy, and the great preponderance of our trade, I’m not going to put it up there as our #1 issue.
ALL democratic countries have an interest in avoiding a Chinese invasion of Taiwan of course.
But we are not at the front of the queue.
The UK is not at risk of strategically losing food, energy, trade or anything else. You think Russia are going to be able to cut our food and energy off? How?
We're not at the front of the queue in avoiding a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. We are a part of an alliance doing that though and working together with our allies to prevent it. If China invaded Taiwan and said they were refusing to supply chips to the western world then we would be devastated economically far more than anything that could happen from Brexit, Sindy or any other petty trivial distracitons like that.
I think we'll largely be liberated on energy security issues in the next 10-20 years, and our food is assured with our web of trade deals and domestic production.
It's international and global stability that we depend upon as a services-based trading nation (that's where we earn our money to pay for everything) so we absolutely do have an interest in maintaining global institutions like the WTO and freedom of navigation of the seas everywhere.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
How to deal with that level of mindboggling ignorance?
PB Brexiters love to talk about deploying their divisions (how many do they have?) into the Far East because it fits their ideology that Europe - ie the continent we live in - can be ignored.
It’s sheer fantasy, and does not bode well for the U.K.’s future prosperity which has to be based on the world as it is.
That might well be true, but your insouciance about the strategic threat is equally silly.
I didn’t have you down as a Brexity idiot, but I guess you must be.
I’m not insouciant.
I am reminding the PB Brexit incel group-thinkers that obsessing over China and military deployments to the Far East is not a substitute for a defence strategy.
Turning your back on global alliances and pretending the world ends at the borders of Europe is not a substitute for a defence strategy either.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
What do you think the UK would do if China did invade Taiwan? I'd guess at absolutely nothing.
Sanctions, resolutions in UN (vetoed of course), very probably nothing else unless the US was involved in the defence.
Oh, and pray that the Queen Elizabeth is not in range of missiles yet.
China if it invaded Taiwan and the US had not already taken military action in response would not target a UK aircraft carrier as that would be an attack on a NATO member which would guarantee a US response as well as from the UK
Mistakes happen in war, especially if people are being silly and it does not appear to me that the Queen Elizabeth has adequate protection to be deployed in such a scenario.
But I personally think that the US would act to protect Taiwan and that it does have the navy assets to do it. Any invasion force could rapidly find itself as isolated and as helpless as the Argentinians found themselves in the Falklands.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
How to deal with that level of mindboggling ignorance?
PB Brexiters love to talk about deploying their divisions (how many do they have?) into the Far East because it fits their ideology that Europe - ie the continent we live in - can be ignored.
It’s sheer fantasy, and does not bode well for the U.K.’s future prosperity which has to be based on the world as it is.
That might well be true, but your insouciance about the strategic threat is equally silly.
I didn’t have you down as a Brexity idiot, but I guess you must be.
I’m not insouciant.
I am reminding the PB Brexit incel group-thinkers that obsessing over China and military deployments to the Far East is not a substitute for a defence strategy.
Turning your back on global alliances and pretending the world ends at the borders of Europe is not a substitute for a defence strategy either.
But I’ve never said that.
This is your demented characterisation because you have utterly lost the argument.
As I noted a few days ago, I’ve been concerned about the Chinese threat a lot longer than many on this Board who have only got interested since Trump told them to.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Baldwin's need to appease Tory imperialists like Churchill made such a thing utterly impossible.
Churchill was largely in the wilderness in those years, and broadly ignored.
The story of India is that it got each level of progressive self-government and reform about 20 years later than it should have done, when compared to the other dominions, and then only to about 60-70% of the level that it should have done.
I think had it moved on a similar trajectory to Australia and Canada, provincial and local self-government in the 1850s and 1860s, and broader home rule by the 1880s and 1890s, with full dominion status in the 1920s and 1930s, then we'd have had a much more positive long-term relationship over the last 60-70 years with India as a close ally throughout, which would have helped immeasurably with the Cold War, and it might be an influential member of a far more powerful "Six Eyes" today.
It's a nice piece of alternate history, but given contemporary British attitudes, none of that was remotely possible.
I think much of it is, and there was certainly debate on it at the time - just as Home Rule for Ireland was first proposed by Gladstone in the 1880s, but never happened, by which time it was too late - here's a debate on it in 1929:
I wouldn't land it all at the door of unenlightened British attitudes, either - I think that's too simplistic: we are all products of our times, with a only a visionary few able to see how things can be different, and why, and you need to factor in the geopolitical context, and broader realpolitik constraints of the times too, which aren't the same as our constraints and context today.
The contemporary politician most sympathetic to you views about the trajectory of Indian independence was probably Attlee, thanks to his experiences as a member of the Simon Commission. He was in power a couple of decades too late, of course.
It's not as though 'enlightened' attitudes weren't fairly widespread; simply that they were in a minority.
Are these first vaccinations or completed courses. I've seen suggestions that other countries have completed more courses. Although, of course, that may well mean that in those places fewer people have some degree of protection.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
How to deal with that level of mindboggling ignorance?
PB Brexiters love to talk about deploying their divisions (how many do they have?) into the Far East because it fits their ideology that Europe - ie the continent we live in - can be ignored.
It’s sheer fantasy, and does not bode well for the U.K.’s future prosperity which has to be based on the world as it is.
That might well be true, but your insouciance about the strategic threat is equally silly.
I didn’t have you down as a Brexity idiot, but I guess you must be.
I’m not insouciant.
I am reminding the PB Brexit incel group-thinkers that obsessing over China and military deployments to the Far East is not a substitute for a defence strategy.
Turning your back on global alliances and pretending the world ends at the borders of Europe is not a substitute for a defence strategy either.
But I’ve never said that.
This is your demented characterisation because you have utterly lost the argument.
As I noted a few days ago, I’ve been concerned about the Chinese threat a lot longer than many on this Board who have only got interested since Trump told them to.
You're the one who has utterly lost the argument which is why you are throwing around petulant insults like "incels" and "demented".
You're "concerned" about the Chinese threat but think the UK should abandon its plans to work with US and other allies to address that threat? 🤔
My view is simple: I see Russia as a serious but containable threat and China as a potentially uncontainable threat, unless we take additional concerted action now.
I don't even see Russia as a serious threat to be honest. They are too far away, their economy is far too small and largely based upon the export of raw materials and they have a declining population. They can be a damn nuisance, particularly in cyberspace and occasionally with toxic chemicals but a serious threat? Not really.
China on the other hand have immense economic and manufacturing capability, more capital than they know what to do with, a huge population and a complete indifference to any principles that we hold dear. They are thankfully a long way away from us but they have a strategic reach that Russia has not had since the collapse of the USSR.
Are these first vaccinations or completed courses. I've seen suggestions that other countries have completed more courses. Although, of course, that may well mean that in those places fewer people have some degree of protection.
Neither, it is total vaccinations, which allows like-for-like comparisons.
So eg 5% could be anywhere in the range from 5% first, to 2.5% first and 2.5% second.
The Plan will talk about Stages. Not tiers or levels as they have been used before.
Stage 1 (8 March) - primary schools open, secondary schools maybe 15 March with enhanced testing. Limited social meeting outside allowed.
Stage 2 (29 March) - non essential retail opens.
Stage 3 (26 April) - pubs restaurants and hotels open. Inside and out. Maximum of two households mixing. Contact details required, mandatory table service, masks when moving around. No curfew or substantial meal. Domestic holidays allowed including going to holiday homes. One metre plus social distancing in operation.
Stage 4 (31 May) - opening of outdoor sporting areas with capacity restricted eg cricket.
Later (1 September) - subject to vaccine progress, return to near normal domestically.
It has even been suggested that several very senior figures at the DfE are fed up with homeschooling their own less than pleasant children
What is becoming quite clear is that one of the worse outcomes for children would be to find themselves as one of your pupils.
Well, we’re even mate, because I’ve found myself feeling really sorry for any poor sod who served under your command given how unpleasant and selfish you’ve shown yourself to be.
Selfish. From the teacher who doesn't want to spend an extra few days helping his pupils.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of my army career I've mentioned none of it. You meanwhile have told us a lot about how you approach the teaching profession.
You're in the wrong job.
As I have repeatedly told you, I have spent many extra days helping people. And I have worked in extension lessons, after school and in holidays, doing just that.
So that makes you a liar as well as a fool.
What I object to is having it imposed by diktat to protect the careers of your fellow thick poshos.
When you apologise for lying to me and about me, I’ll engage with you again.
Until then - fuck off.
OH NO. NOT ENGAGING.
I'll manage.
Flounce all you want, petal. You didn't want to go the extra mile because Union/DfE whatever. You have to live with that, not me. Oh and your pupils, heaven help them. I hope you don't think too many of them are less than pleasant also.
You really are an arse of the highest order.
As with a lot of people here I suspect were you asked by your employer to drop a planned holiday you would be telling them where to go.
Actually you are probably someone who would thank them for the opportunity while you wife started divorce proceedings.
Thank you for your contribution.
I am not a teacher. A teacher has imo a special duty to his or her charges. I would not work for my employer for free because there aren't several dozen children relying on me for their education and development in this, the most peculiar of times. But for a teacher that is different.
Where you, and evidently ydoer3rfahwer go wrong is in conflating working for The Man (which I do) and working in education at the sharp end.
He would far rather it seems be working for The Man, when all his barbs would be relevant.
Plus he labelled the children of some DfE officials (whom he doesn't know, I'll wager) "less than pleasant". The children, not the DfE officials. He is 100% in the wrong job.
As I'm sure he would admit if he were to engage with me.
I jokingly said that maybe teachers should take an oath on becoming one same as doctors do. I'm not sure there is the same level of commitment for teachers and I'm also not sure they get paid enough for such an attitude to hold. Simply, we as a society don't value teachers very much and this is the result. I think the fault is ours.
We do have professional standards, set by the DfE, which amount to the same thing as an oath. Although they are written by non-teachers and the profession is regulated by civil servants, unlike the GMC. That has drawbacks and advantages which I won’t bother going into as it’s a long essay.
I think however your last but one sentence is spot on.
The GTC regulated teachers from 2000 to 2012 I believe, now its functions handled by the Teaching Regulation Agency within the Department for Education
My memory of the GTC was that it was largely ignored or even disliked by teachers: we were forced to pay a subscription for something which was of no perceived benefit to us. It was supposed to be an equivalent to the GMC but that acts as a de-facto union for doctors while the GTC was a government imposed disciplinary body only, not something that was ever seen to stand up for teachers in terms of pay or conditions. Gove's abolition of it was one of his popular moves amongst teachers.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
How to deal with that level of mindboggling ignorance?
PB Brexiters love to talk about deploying their divisions (how many do they have?) into the Far East because it fits their ideology that Europe - ie the continent we live in - can be ignored.
It’s sheer fantasy, and does not bode well for the U.K.’s future prosperity which has to be based on the world as it is.
That might well be true, but your insouciance about the strategic threat is equally silly.
I didn’t have you down as a Brexity idiot, but I guess you must be.
I’m not insouciant.
I am reminding the PB Brexit incel group-thinkers that obsessing over China and military deployments to the Far East is not a substitute for a defence strategy.
Turning your back on global alliances and pretending the world ends at the borders of Europe is not a substitute for a defence strategy either.
But I’ve never said that.
This is your demented characterisation because you have utterly lost the argument.
As I noted a few days ago, I’ve been concerned about the Chinese threat a lot longer than many on this Board who have only got interested since Trump told them to.
You're "concerned" about the Chinese threat but think the UK should abandon its plans to work with US and other allies to address that threat? 🤔
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You think nobody seriously believes China is one of our biggest risks? 🤔
What do you think are our biggest risks ahead of China?
I told you a few days ago and you studiously ignored it.
1. Russia 2. The defence consequences of SINDY 3. Destabilisation in Middle East / NA.
China probably comes after that.
Our defence threats reflect geographic reality and the strength of trade, food and energy flows.
Not flat earth fantasy.
You're in so far in de Nile you're walking like an Egyptian.
China are the world's number one long term threat - and as a country in the world they are our number one long term threat too.
Russia are piddly bit players. Russia to China is like England/the UK to the USA. Russia used to be a superpower, they're not anymore, they're just playing at it nowadays.
The consequences of Sindy need to be dealt with but we'll get over that one way or another, its not that consequential for dealing with our enemies.
The Middle East we're still dealing with but its not as significant as China.
China are the new evil empire, they're every bit as much a threat as the USSR was. If you deny that you're not big or clever, you're just showing how little attention you're paying.
Realistically now Hong Kong is no longer a British colony we will not do anything about China, even if they invade Taiwan, unless the US has done something first
Thompson showing he knows as much about geopolitics and history as he does about vaccine development! China is a political and trade threat to the West, by the nature of their size and their disregard for fundamental principles of international law. They are a military threat to Taiwan, but very unlikely to invade. To equate them with cold war USSR is utter hyperbole that shows no understanding of history. There is virtually no comparison.
Are these first vaccinations or completed courses. I've seen suggestions that other countries have completed more courses. Although, of course, that may well mean that in those places fewer people have some degree of protection.
Neither, it is total vaccinations, which allows like-for-like comparisons.
So eg 5% could be anywhere in the range from 5% first, to 2.5% first and 2.5% second.
Always a problem, crude figures. Don't tell the whole story. But I'm sure you are right on the numbers
China if it invaded Taiwan and the US had not already taken military action in response would not target a UK aircraft carrier as that would be an attack on a NATO member which would guarantee a US response as well as from the UK
NATO membership is irrelevant once you're south of the Tropic of Cancer. Article 6 exists to prevent the US from being obliged to defend British and French colonial possessions.
The Plan will talk about Stages. Not tiers or levels as they have been used before.
Stage 1 (8 March) - primary schools open, secondary schools maybe 15 March with enhanced testing. Limited social meeting outside allowed.
Stage 2 (29 March) - non essential retail opens.
Stage 3 (26 April) - pubs restaurants and hotels open. Inside and out. Maximum of two households mixing. Contact details required, mandatory table service, masks when moving around. No curfew or substantial meal. Domestic holidays allowed including going to holiday homes. One metre plus social distancing in operation.
Stage 4 (31 May) - opening of outdoor sporting areas with capacity restricted eg cricket.
Later (1 September) - subject to vaccine progress, return to near normal domestically.
It has even been suggested that several very senior figures at the DfE are fed up with homeschooling their own less than pleasant children
What is becoming quite clear is that one of the worse outcomes for children would be to find themselves as one of your pupils.
Well, we’re even mate, because I’ve found myself feeling really sorry for any poor sod who served under your command given how unpleasant and selfish you’ve shown yourself to be.
Selfish. From the teacher who doesn't want to spend an extra few days helping his pupils.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of my army career I've mentioned none of it. You meanwhile have told us a lot about how you approach the teaching profession.
You're in the wrong job.
As I have repeatedly told you, I have spent many extra days helping people. And I have worked in extension lessons, after school and in holidays, doing just that.
So that makes you a liar as well as a fool.
What I object to is having it imposed by diktat to protect the careers of your fellow thick poshos.
When you apologise for lying to me and about me, I’ll engage with you again.
Until then - fuck off.
OH NO. NOT ENGAGING.
I'll manage.
Flounce all you want, petal. You didn't want to go the extra mile because Union/DfE whatever. You have to live with that, not me. Oh and your pupils, heaven help them. I hope you don't think too many of them are less than pleasant also.
You really are an arse of the highest order.
As with a lot of people here I suspect were you asked by your employer to drop a planned holiday you would be telling them where to go.
Actually you are probably someone who would thank them for the opportunity while you wife started divorce proceedings.
Thank you for your contribution.
I am not a teacher. A teacher has imo a special duty to his or her charges. I would not work for my employer for free because there aren't several dozen children relying on me for their education and development in this, the most peculiar of times. But for a teacher that is different.
Where you, and evidently ydoer3rfahwer go wrong is in conflating working for The Man (which I do) and working in education at the sharp end.
He would far rather it seems be working for The Man, when all his barbs would be relevant.
Plus he labelled the children of some DfE officials (whom he doesn't know, I'll wager) "less than pleasant". The children, not the DfE officials. He is 100% in the wrong job.
As I'm sure he would admit if he were to engage with me.
I jokingly said that maybe teachers should take an oath on becoming one same as doctors do. I'm not sure there is the same level of commitment for teachers and I'm also not sure they get paid enough for such an attitude to hold. Simply, we as a society don't value teachers very much and this is the result. I think the fault is ours.
We do have professional standards, set by the DfE, which amount to the same thing as an oath. Although they are written by non-teachers and the profession is regulated by civil servants, unlike the GMC. That has drawbacks and advantages which I won’t bother going into as it’s a long essay.
I think however your last but one sentence is spot on.
The GTC regulated teachers from 2000 to 2012 I believe, now its functions handled by the Teaching Regulation Agency within the Department for Education
My memory of the GTC was that it was largely ignored or even disliked by teachers: we were forced to pay a subscription for something which was of no perceived benefit to us. It was supposed to be an equivalent to the GMC but that acts as a de-facto union for doctors while the GTC was a government imposed disciplinary body only, not something that was ever seen to stand up for teachers in terms of pay or conditions. Gove's abolition of it was one of his popular moves amongst teachers.
I don't think the GMC acts as a union for doctors, and I would be surprised if any of our resident medics think it does. It used to, at one time, but now it is simply a regulatory and licensing body.
The Plan will talk about Stages. Not tiers or levels as they have been used before.
Stage 1 (8 March) - primary schools open, secondary schools maybe 15 March with enhanced testing. Limited social meeting outside allowed.
Stage 2 (29 March) - non essential retail opens.
Stage 3 (26 April) - pubs restaurants and hotels open. Inside and out. Maximum of two households mixing. Contact details required, mandatory table service, masks when moving around. No curfew or substantial meal. Domestic holidays allowed including going to holiday homes. One metre plus social distancing in operation.
Stage 4 (31 May) - opening of outdoor sporting areas with capacity restricted eg cricket.
Later (1 September) - subject to vaccine progress, return to near normal domestically.
It has even been suggested that several very senior figures at the DfE are fed up with homeschooling their own less than pleasant children
What is becoming quite clear is that one of the worse outcomes for children would be to find themselves as one of your pupils.
Well, we’re even mate, because I’ve found myself feeling really sorry for any poor sod who served under your command given how unpleasant and selfish you’ve shown yourself to be.
Selfish. From the teacher who doesn't want to spend an extra few days helping his pupils.
Whatever the strengths and weaknesses of my army career I've mentioned none of it. You meanwhile have told us a lot about how you approach the teaching profession.
You're in the wrong job.
As I have repeatedly told you, I have spent many extra days helping people. And I have worked in extension lessons, after school and in holidays, doing just that.
So that makes you a liar as well as a fool.
What I object to is having it imposed by diktat to protect the careers of your fellow thick poshos.
When you apologise for lying to me and about me, I’ll engage with you again.
Until then - fuck off.
OH NO. NOT ENGAGING.
I'll manage.
Flounce all you want, petal. You didn't want to go the extra mile because Union/DfE whatever. You have to live with that, not me. Oh and your pupils, heaven help them. I hope you don't think too many of them are less than pleasant also.
You really are an arse of the highest order.
As with a lot of people here I suspect were you asked by your employer to drop a planned holiday you would be telling them where to go.
Actually you are probably someone who would thank them for the opportunity while you wife started divorce proceedings.
Thank you for your contribution.
I am not a teacher. A teacher has imo a special duty to his or her charges. I would not work for my employer for free because there aren't several dozen children relying on me for their education and development in this, the most peculiar of times. But for a teacher that is different.
Where you, and evidently ydoer3rfahwer go wrong is in conflating working for The Man (which I do) and working in education at the sharp end.
He would far rather it seems be working for The Man, when all his barbs would be relevant.
Plus he labelled the children of some DfE officials (whom he doesn't know, I'll wager) "less than pleasant". The children, not the DfE officials. He is 100% in the wrong job.
As I'm sure he would admit if he were to engage with me.
I jokingly said that maybe teachers should take an oath on becoming one same as doctors do. I'm not sure there is the same level of commitment for teachers and I'm also not sure they get paid enough for such an attitude to hold. Simply, we as a society don't value teachers very much and this is the result. I think the fault is ours.
We do have professional standards, set by the DfE, which amount to the same thing as an oath. Although they are written by non-teachers and the profession is regulated by civil servants, unlike the GMC. That has drawbacks and advantages which I won’t bother going into as it’s a long essay.
I think however your last but one sentence is spot on.
The GTC regulated teachers from 2000 to 2012 I believe, now its functions handled by the Teaching Regulation Agency within the Department for Education
My memory of the GTC was that it was largely ignored or even disliked by teachers: we were forced to pay a subscription for something which was of no perceived benefit to us. It was supposed to be an equivalent to the GMC but that acts as a de-facto union for doctors while the GTC was a government imposed disciplinary body only, not something that was ever seen to stand up for teachers in terms of pay or conditions. Gove's abolition of it was one of his popular moves amongst teachers.
I don't think the GMC acts as a union for doctors, and I would be surprised if any of our resident medics think it does. It used to, at one time, but now it is simply a regulatory and licensing body.
Yes - the Trade Union for Doctors is the BMA.
It's even registered with the Certification Officer as such.
China if it invaded Taiwan and the US had not already taken military action in response would not target a UK aircraft carrier as that would be an attack on a NATO member which would guarantee a US response as well as from the UK
NATO membership is irrelevant once you're south of the Tropic of Cancer. Article 6 exists to prevent the US from being obliged to defend British and French colonial possessions.
There are no British colonial possessions anywhere near China now Hong Kong has been returned to Beijing, any British involvement in Taiwan would only come after a US military response to a Chinese invasion, probably alongside Japan and S Korea
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
How to deal with that level of mindboggling ignorance?
PB Brexiters love to talk about deploying their divisions (how many do they have?) into the Far East because it fits their ideology that Europe - ie the continent we live in - can be ignored.
It’s sheer fantasy, and does not bode well for the U.K.’s future prosperity which has to be based on the world as it is.
That might well be true, but your insouciance about the strategic threat is equally silly.
I didn’t have you down as a Brexity idiot, but I guess you must be.
I’m not insouciant.
I am reminding the PB Brexit incel group-thinkers that obsessing over China and military deployments to the Far East is not a substitute for a defence strategy.
China if it invaded Taiwan and the US had not already taken military action in response would not target a UK aircraft carrier as that would be an attack on a NATO member which would guarantee a US response as well as from the UK
NATO membership is irrelevant once you're south of the Tropic of Cancer. Article 6 exists to prevent the US from being obliged to defend British and French colonial possessions.
He is right though, for the wrong reasons. A U.K. carrier group East of Suez on present arrangements is likely to have US Marine Corps embarked and a multinational escort group. Hence an attack on one is very literally an attack on all.
You deal with a threat by having the power to overcome it, not by collywobbling all the time. It is rather silly to see portentous warnings about 'global threats' on PB, but any suggestion of what we can do amounting to little more than - nothing unless America is doing it and tells us to help.
The lesson of history tells us we need to build up the Navy. I am not experienced in defence matters, but I would suggest that small carriers and crafts capable of moving fast and mounting effective, quick operations would be better than vast carriers that we can't afford the aircraft for. A truly independent and usable nuclear capability would also be a plus.
My view is simple: I see Russia as a serious but containable threat and China as a potentially uncontainable threat, unless we take additional concerted action now.
I don't even see Russia as a serious threat to be honest. They are too far away, their economy is far too small and largely based upon the export of raw materials and they have a declining population. They can be a damn nuisance, particularly in cyberspace and occasionally with toxic chemicals but a serious threat? Not really.
China on the other hand have immense economic and manufacturing capability, more capital than they know what to do with, a huge population and a complete indifference to any principles that we hold dear. They are thankfully a long way away from us but they have a strategic reach that Russia has not had since the collapse of the USSR.
I sympathise with that, and I'd just say Russia has used nuclear (radioactive) and chemical weapons on our soil before, regularly probes our air defences, it tries to hack into our government nets regularly and subvert our democratic process, and would march into the Baltic States tomorrow if it could. It also is a threat to the stability of Europe's eastern border more broadly, and its geopolitical independence through energy leverage more broadly.
But, I agree. It's can't pwn us and make us a whipping boy forevermore like China could. It has the economics, size, reach, power and influence to domino-flip most of the free world, and bully the rest with force, if not checked.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Attlee helped found NATO, develop our nuclear deterrent and modernise the RAF with a jet bomber force, so he was certainly responsible with defence and foreign policy.
But, and I'm shocked I'm about to say this, we were spending too much on defence overall with garrisons of 10,000 men all over the world - everywhere - and trying to be a superpower sans money and increasingly sans empire.
That was a mistake.
I think the 1935 India Act was a missed opportunity; India should have been given full dominion status. There would have been no partition. It then would likely have actively participated in WW2 as an ally of the UK as all the other dominions did.
India would then probably have moved to be a republic by the 1950s or 1960s, but slowly and steadily. There would still have been a risk of tension and conflict between Muslim and Hindu areas - a very real one - but at least a constitutional and federal framework within which to debate them.
Baldwin's need to appease Tory imperialists like Churchill made such a thing utterly impossible.
Churchill was largely in the wilderness in those years, and broadly ignored.
The story of India is that it got each level of progressive self-government and reform about 20 years later than it should have done, when compared to the other dominions, and then only to about 60-70% of the level that it should have done.
I think had it moved on a similar trajectory to Australia and Canada, provincial and local self-government in the 1850s and 1860s, and broader home rule by the 1880s and 1890s, with full dominion status in the 1920s and 1930s, then we'd have had a much more positive long-term relationship over the last 60-70 years with India as a close ally throughout, which would have helped immeasurably with the Cold War, and it might be an influential member of a far more powerful "Six Eyes" today.
It's a nice piece of alternate history, but given contemporary British attitudes, none of that was remotely possible.
I think much of it is, and there was certainly debate on it at the time - just as Home Rule for Ireland was first proposed by Gladstone in the 1880s, but never happened, by which time it was too late - here's a debate on it in 1929:
I wouldn't land it all at the door of unenlightened British attitudes, either - I think that's too simplistic: we are all products of our times, with a only a visionary few able to see how things can be different, and why, and you need to factor in the geopolitical context, and broader realpolitik constraints of the times too, which aren't the same as our constraints and context today.
The contemporary politician most sympathetic to you views about the trajectory of Indian independence was probably Attlee, thanks to his experiences as a member of the Simon Commission. He was in power a couple of decades too late, of course.
It's not as though 'enlightened' attitudes weren't fairly widespread; simply that they were in a minority.
Attlee favoured a "new colonialism" - of a benevolent and enlightened type, as an extension of municipal socialism - in Africa, even into the early 1950s.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
How to deal with that level of mindboggling ignorance?
PB Brexiters love to talk about deploying their divisions (how many do they have?) into the Far East because it fits their ideology that Europe - ie the continent we live in - can be ignored.
It’s sheer fantasy, and does not bode well for the U.K.’s future prosperity which has to be based on the world as it is.
The "world as it is " is one where the EU accounts for a declining portion of world trade. How does that align with future prosperity?
You deal with a threat by having the power to overcome it, not by collywobbling all the time. It is rather silly to see portentous warnings about 'global threats' on PB, but any suggestion of what we can do amounting to little more than - nothing unless America is doing it and tells us to help.
The lesson of history tells us we need to build up the Navy. I am not experienced in defence matters, but I would suggest that small carriers and crafts capable of moving fast and mounting effective, quick operations would be better than vast carriers that we can't afford the aircraft for. A truly independent and usable nuclear capability would also be a plus.
IANAE either but I think all militaries should be reviewing the Azerbaijan conflict very carefully. Cheap unmanned drones turned out to be key. I suspect that is the future of warfare with on the ground human involvement rapidly becoming less significant and less effective. We should probably be investing accordingly.
China if it invaded Taiwan and the US had not already taken military action in response would not target a UK aircraft carrier as that would be an attack on a NATO member which would guarantee a US response as well as from the UK
NATO membership is irrelevant once you're south of the Tropic of Cancer. Article 6 exists to prevent the US from being obliged to defend British and French colonial possessions.
He is right though, for the wrong reasons. A U.K. carrier group East of Suez on present arrangements is likely to have US Marine Corps embarked and a multinational escort group. Hence an attack on one is very literally an attack on all.
Indeed, when it goes to the South China Sea the Queen Elizabeth will have a US destroyer alongside
My view is simple: I see Russia as a serious but containable threat and China as a potentially uncontainable threat, unless we take additional concerted action now.
I don't even see Russia as a serious threat to be honest. They are too far away, their economy is far too small and largely based upon the export of raw materials and they have a declining population. They can be a damn nuisance, particularly in cyberspace and occasionally with toxic chemicals but a serious threat? Not really.
China on the other hand have immense economic and manufacturing capability, more capital than they know what to do with, a huge population and a complete indifference to any principles that we hold dear. They are thankfully a long way away from us but they have a strategic reach that Russia has not had since the collapse of the USSR.
I sympathise with that, and I'd just say Russia has used nuclear (radioactive) and chemical weapons on our soil before, regularly probes our air defences, it tries to hack into our government nets regularly and subvert our democratic process, and would march into the Baltic States tomorrow if it could. It also is a threat to the stability of Europe's eastern border more broadly, and its geopolitical independence through energy leverage more broadly.
But, I agree. It's can't pwn us and make us a whipping boy forevermore like China could. It has the economics, size, reach, power and influence to domino-flip most of the free world, and bully the rest with force, if not checked.
Playing devil’s advocate, one could argue that a sensible British policy would be to align with Russia against the EU. If only Prussia was available it would be just like the old days.
My view is simple: I see Russia as a serious but containable threat and China as a potentially uncontainable threat, unless we take additional concerted action now.
For me the "Chinese threat" routinely conflates 2 things and the difference between them is greater than all the tea in ... China.
That they become the biggest and most successful economy on earth - closing and possibly even reversing the wealth gap with the West.
That they subjugate other nations and minorities within their own borders - e.g. Hong Kong, the Uighurs, parts of Africa.
I'm more concerned about the second. Indeed I'm not sure I'm bothered at all about the first. We have no god-given right to remain many times richer than the developing world. We've had a good run and much of it was based on exploitation of those now seeking to catch up.
British Recovery bond. Aren't those known as gilts ?
Yes. It's something that has been mooted on here a few times. Depending on the terms I'd expect a massive oversubscription.
However, given that we simply sell our gilts to the BoE right now and pay ourselves the interest I'm not sure what mileage the idea actually had. We'd be better off getting people to spend their new found savings in the wider economy than on government bonds.
British Recovery bond. Aren't those known as gilts ?
Maybe, but sold directly to the public as war bonds were, I believe, during the World Wars.
I wondered whether they would be a good idea, but the problem is that it puts the government in competition with the banks for capital from personal savings.
My view is simple: I see Russia as a serious but containable threat and China as a potentially uncontainable threat, unless we take additional concerted action now.
For me the "Chinese threat" routinely conflates 2 things and the difference between them is greater than all the tea in ... China.
That they become the biggest and most successful economy on earth - closing and possibly even reversing the wealth gap with the West.
That they subjugate other nations and minorities within their own borders - e.g. Hong Kong, the Uighurs, parts of Africa.
I'm more concerned about the second. Indeed I'm not sure I'm bothered at all about the first. We have no god-given right to remain many times richer than the developing world. We've had a good run and much of it was based on exploitation of those now seeking to catch up.
You're not concerned that a power who think genocide is a perfectly satisfactory tool of state, who has no regard whatsoever for the rule of law, human rights or freedom of expression and an arrogant disregard for our IP property rights might become the most powerful economy on the planet?
I mean, wow. I would respectfully direct you towards @ydoethur's summer school.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You realise the majority of the world's advanced chip manufacturing is situated in Taiwan - and a good slug of the rest in South Korea ?
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
He literally said the other day that China invading Taiwan would not affect the UK. 🤦🏻♂️
How to deal with that level of mindboggling ignorance?
PB Brexiters love to talk about deploying their divisions (how many do they have?) into the Far East because it fits their ideology that Europe - ie the continent we live in - can be ignored.
It’s sheer fantasy, and does not bode well for the U.K.’s future prosperity which has to be based on the world as it is.
The "world as it is " is one where the EU accounts for a declining portion of world trade. How does that align with future prosperity?
The world as it is for U.K. trade is very roughly as follows:
Europe (inc EU) 50% USA 15% APAC 15% (China about half) Middle East 5% ROW 15%
In terms of Europe’s share, it’s no different to 2010 as far as I can tell from some quick eyeballing.
I read somehwere yesterday that Starmer is planning to pitch himself as the new Atlee - as was suggested by some on here several weeks ago. He will need more than just an image of a ghost of the past. Above all he needs some ideas and policies to catch the mood. We'll see.
Good luck with that. Starmer and Attlee are not two individuals that I necessarily associate together. Attlee led a great reforming government (I say this as a Conservative), Starmer is, well he couldn't reform a lemonade!
I don't agree about Attlee's government - many of the major reforms, especially the health service and education, were in the pipeline anyway, and lots of the others, such as his nationalisations, were self-defeating or actively harmful. He and the Churchill government after him kept rationing and other wartime controls for much too long. And the bloodbath in India over partition occurred on his indifferent watch. The one good thing he did was stand to the Russians. But that was probably inevitable.
But, anyway, what let Attlee do as much as he did was his very strong team, which Starmer doesn't have (Annelise who?).
Bit harsh to blame Attlee for a series of atrocious harvests due partly to the war and partly to bad weather.
Squandering Marshall Aid I will give you.
Bad harvests in Britain just after the war don't explain why Labour kept e.g. sugar or clothes rationing, nor why they campaigned in 1950 on continuing rationing indefinitely. They were addicted to controls for their own sake, and terrified of ending them, like those who want lockdown to continue forever.
My understanding is they were trying to conserve foreign currency and earnings (this is a time of Bretton Woods, and exchange controls) to pay for debt, military equipment and large armed forces, including the cost of the Korean War. This was extremely expensive after WW2 and the military manpower challenge pronounced after the loss of India.
Of course, a better way would simply have been to ditch socialism and go for domestic modernisation of industry and free markets.
Yes, and ditch the fixed exchange rate, which would have ended the need to conserve foreign currency. If there has to be rationing of non-essentials, like sugar, it should be done by the purse not by the state.
The same mania for state control whatever the cost caused us to set up an overcentralised and unresponsive health service and planning controls that mean only big developers can build (ugly, low quality) houses.
The Attlee government was rather crap.
Fixed exchange rates were not really in their power to end, as anyone who wanted American loans had to accept American rules, which were set by Bretton Woods. And without American loans, there would have been no imports at all.
There was in fact a substantial devaluation in 1948 - 31% against the dollar, IIIRC - but it didn’t exactly help. It just led to major inflation.
Devaluations don't help unless they're accompanied by supply-side reforms, otherwise Italy's economy would have been the most successful in Europe, and Germany's and Switzerland's the least.
Fixed exchange rates - certainly we could have ended them. We might have had to do without the American loan (even that's not certain) but its importance, and that of Marshall Aid, has been overrated.
But this is straying rather far into counterfactuals. I still say Attlee's government is hugely overrated, doubtless because it is one of only two or three modern British governments that have moved this country significantly leftwards in many areas.
I’m no starry eyed fan of Attlee’s government, but I honestly think your solutions don’t match the very real problems they faced.
Yes, a government dedicated to investment over health might have done better in the long term, but it wasn’t as straightforward as ‘devalue and do without American loans.’ I really don’t see, with 25% of Britain’s entire national wealth destroyed by the war, how that could have worked.
I think the misallocation of resources is a key problem, and of socialism more broadly.
At a time when everyone else was developing diesel and electric technology, post-war we launched a national roll-out of... new steam locomotives. We were still building new ones in 1960.
It's because we made some really shit economic decisions post WW2, and tried to live as a superpower beyond our means (which had gone in WW2 anyway) for too long.
Sounds familiar.
I asked a few days ago why folks were so keen to deploy military force to the Far East and eventually @Philip_Thompson claimed it was because, “the world is our neighbourhood”.
We are going to have to be a helluva lot smarter, post Brexit, if we want to prosper.
I agree that Gove would be well suited to a national infrastructure role (which sadly cannot he left to Treasury), but there is the small matter of the Union to deal with as well.
I also said that is where our enemies/threats are.
The world is our neighborhood, it takes seconds to hours for telecommunications or people/missiles to get from any part of the planet to any other. Geography doesn't matter that much anymore, which is why we need to target where our enemies and allies are.
Risk assessment says Asia is a bigger risk than Europe. You can't say what enemy/risk/threat in western Europe we're supposed to be tackling that we aren't.
No one seriously believes our biggest risks are in East Asia.
Unless you are talking more Wu-Flu, to which the best response is probably not to deploy an aircraft carrier.
You think nobody seriously believes China is one of our biggest risks? 🤔
What do you think are our biggest risks ahead of China?
I told you a few days ago and you studiously ignored it.
1. Russia 2. The defence consequences of SINDY 3. Destabilisation in Middle East / NA.
China probably comes after that.
Our defence threats reflect geographic reality and the strength of trade, food and energy flows.
Not flat earth fantasy.
You're in so far in de Nile you're walking like an Egyptian.
China are the world's number one long term threat - and as a country in the world they are our number one long term threat too.
Russia are piddly bit players. Russia to China is like England/the UK to the USA. Russia used to be a superpower, they're not anymore, they're just playing at it nowadays.
The consequences of Sindy need to be dealt with but we'll get over that one way or another, its not that consequential for dealing with our enemies.
The Middle East we're still dealing with but its not as significant as China.
China are the new evil empire, they're every bit as much a threat as the USSR was. If you deny that you're not big or clever, you're just showing how little attention you're paying.
Realistically now Hong Kong is no longer a British colony we will not do anything about China, even if they invade Taiwan, unless the US has done something first
Thompson showing he knows as much about geopolitics and history as he does about vaccine development! China is a political and trade threat to the West, by the nature of their size and their disregard for fundamental principles of international law. They are a military threat to Taiwan, but very unlikely to invade. To equate them with cold war USSR is utter hyperbole that shows no understanding of history. There is virtually no comparison.
Indeed. The Chinese deeply studied the collapse of the USSR and learned the lessons not to repeat. Meanwhile the West did several laps of honour punching the air. Before greedily lusting over the vast profits to be made in China and turning a total blind eye to the nature of the regime. We learned next to nowt from the Soviet failure. Other than we were right all along. Maybe we weren't.
British Recovery bond. Aren't those known as gilts ?
Maybe, but sold directly to the public as war bonds were, I believe, during the World Wars.
I wondered whether they would be a good idea, but the problem is that it puts the government in competition with the banks for capital from personal savings.
That’s why I might be in favour. Not because I want a “war bond” but because banks might have to sharpen their pencils on savings rates.
My view is simple: I see Russia as a serious but containable threat and China as a potentially uncontainable threat, unless we take additional concerted action now.
For me the "Chinese threat" routinely conflates 2 things and the difference between them is greater than all the tea in ... China.
That they become the biggest and most successful economy on earth - closing and possibly even reversing the wealth gap with the West.
That they subjugate other nations and minorities within their own borders - e.g. Hong Kong, the Uighurs, parts of Africa.
I'm more concerned about the second. Indeed I'm not sure I'm bothered at all about the first. We have no god-given right to remain many times richer than the developing world. We've had a good run and much of it was based on exploitation of those now seeking to catch up.
Your not concerned that a power who think genocide is a perfectly satisfactory tool of state, who has no regard whatsoever for the rule of law, human rights or freedom of expression and an arrogant disregard for our IP property rights might become the most powerful economy on the planet?
I mean, wow. I would respectfully direct you towards @ydoethur's summer school.
I'm saying that's the aspect I am concerned about.
Comments
From 1.1 to 0.9 helps a hell of a lot. From 1.0 to 0.8, also.
Not only is he a policy free zone, I don’t even see any evidence that ideological outriders - the left wing think tanks, intellectuals etc - have much interesting to say.
That wasn’t the case for Thatcher, Blair or even Cameron.
Or for Attlee.
What you might see as regional issues on the other side of the globe have global consequences. Irrespective of any superpower ambitions China might have.
How to deal with that level of mindboggling ignorance?
It’s a view.
Beeching, hmm. I'm often tried to be sympathetic to him. The trouble is he was so dogmatic. He was interviewed again in the early 1980s, before he died, and the main regret he seemed to have was that he didn't go further, including closing the ECML between Newcastle and Edinburgh on the basis that it would only inconvenience Berwick-upon-Tweed and the WCML was sufficient. He wanted to only prioritise 3,000 miles for investment of the over 10,000 miles we have today.
He didn't take into account anything but raw commercial profitability of a line. There was no Treasury Green Book analysis of RoI for the wider or local economy, nor the displacement costs of maintenance or congestion onto the roads, and the savings he actually achieved in the end were very modest. So, I think he was actually rather an unimaginative and dogmatic man, and entirely unrepentant even with the benefit of 20 years hindsight - which is when I'd expect someone reflective to acknowledge what they got wrong.
I think he overclosed about 1,000-2,000 route miles, failed to recommend general operational economies on the balance of the retained network, and the omission on recommendations of how to handle of land disposals post closure was grossly irresponsible - and it directly inhibits feasible reopenings today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g39gLzZd68Y
Russia is not the USSR. China could be.
I disagree with you on Trident. It prevents nuclear blackmail by rogue states or groups, and also a scenario where a major prospective enemy calculates they can directly threaten Britain unilaterally without inviting an American response.
They are complimentary assets.
It’s sheer fantasy, and does not bode well for the U.K.’s future prosperity which has to be based on the world as it is.
Which western European country are we more likely to risk armed conflict with over China?
What do you think the UK would do if China did invade Taiwan? I'd guess at absolutely nothing.
But unless you can convince me that computer chips are more strategically important than food, energy, and the great preponderance of our trade, I’m not going to put it up there as our #1 issue.
ALL democratic countries have an interest in avoiding a Chinese invasion of Taiwan of course.
But we are not at the front of the queue.
The USA and friends like the UK, Singapore, South Korea and many more projecting their strength around Taiwan is more likely to deter China from invading in the first place.
If he had a weakness it was his emotional and erratic personality, which became a strength in WWII, of course.
I agree on Trident, as long as Putin, Xi and Kim Jong Un and potentially Iran have nuclear weapons, so should we
I think earlier estimates of 40,000 are closer to the truth - the Chinese crackdown may have been too late, but I am sure it got the job done.
I'd tell all BNO passport holders to apply now, and slip out via multiple routes on multiple pretexts as soon as the Rona restrictions allow - and before if they can.
We're not at the front of the queue in avoiding a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. We are a part of an alliance doing that though and working together with our allies to prevent it. If China invaded Taiwan and said they were refusing to supply chips to the western world then we would be devastated economically far more than anything that could happen from Brexit, Sindy or any other petty trivial distracitons like that.
As an aside, he once sent a destroyer to deal with a strike in Liverpool, I believe.
As a further aside, had WWII been fought as he wanted rather than as the Americans, it would have lasted years longer.
As I said, they're like us. Still relevant but shades of their former selves.
https://coconuts.co/jakarta/food-drink/dominos-indonesia-jumps-on-boba-fad-with-bubble-tea-and-butterscotch-sauce-pizza/
As it happens I think the government are going to go a bit slower than they need to but it's only on the margins and given the uncertainties, the previous history of overconfidence and underestimation of the virus, and the calculus of health and political and economic risk, I don't blame them one iota for that.
The fact is, in the grand scheme of things with this pandemic, and given all we have gone through to this point, if we are out of this (and for good) by June July time, that is a result.
If we truly were looking at being "locked up till July" I would be joining the chorus of "c'mon that's ridiculous!" but we are not. That's tabloid tosh. The plan is a gradual return to normality, starting 8th March with schools, followed by restrictions being lifted gradually over the spring until by summer it's go buddy go.
I'm happy with that. If Johnson offered that to me now (with a guarantee thrown in) I would bite his hand off. The main concern is not a few weeks here and there on the reopening timetable but the possibility of something surprising and unpleasant from the virus which takes us backwards again. That's a worry. What I don't worry about is that the government's understandable caution at this crux point will morph into a determination to keep society in the deep freeze to infinity and beyond. That smacks of paranoia to me. Paranoia that, by a certain dark irony, is probably fed by being in lockdown.
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/lords/1929/nov/05/india-the-viceroys-statement
I wouldn't land it all at the door of unenlightened British attitudes, either - I think that's too simplistic: we are all products of our times, with a only a visionary few able to see how things can be different, and why, and you need to factor in the geopolitical context, and broader realpolitik constraints of the times too, which aren't the same as our constraints and context today.
Had Britain fallen in 1940 of course then Moscow would likely have fallen to the Nazis by winter 1940
Oh, and pray that the Queen Elizabeth is not in range of missiles yet.
And yes I know the Russian ships are probably not 'just passing'!
I’m not insouciant.
I am reminding the PB Brexit incel group-thinkers that obsessing over China and military deployments to the Far East is not a substitute for a defence strategy.
It's international and global stability that we depend upon as a services-based trading nation (that's where we earn our money to pay for everything) so we absolutely do have an interest in maintaining global institutions like the WTO and freedom of navigation of the seas everywhere.
https://www.politico.eu/coronavirus-in-europe/
But I personally think that the US would act to protect Taiwan and that it does have the navy assets to do it. Any invasion force could rapidly find itself as isolated and as helpless as the Argentinians found themselves in the Falklands.
This is your demented characterisation because you have utterly lost the argument.
As I noted a few days ago, I’ve been concerned about the Chinese threat a lot longer than many on this Board who have only got interested since Trump told them to.
It's not as though 'enlightened' attitudes weren't fairly widespread; simply that they were in a minority.
have completed more courses.
Although, of course, that may well mean that in those places fewer people have some degree of protection.
You're "concerned" about the Chinese threat but think the UK should abandon its plans to work with US and other allies to address that threat? 🤔
China on the other hand have immense economic and manufacturing capability, more capital than they know what to do with, a huge population and a complete indifference to any principles that we hold dear. They are thankfully a long way away from us but they have a strategic reach that Russia has not had since the collapse of the USSR.
So eg 5% could be anywhere in the range from 5% first, to 2.5% first and 2.5% second.
There isn’t one.
You literally made it up.
But I'm sure you are right on the numbers
Ergo we are still outperforming them by a substantial margin; they are not (yet) catching up.
It's even registered with the Certification Officer as such.
You're better than this.
The lesson of history tells us we need to build up the Navy. I am not experienced in defence matters, but I would suggest that small carriers and crafts capable of moving fast and mounting effective, quick operations would be better than vast carriers that we can't afford the aircraft for. A truly independent and usable nuclear capability would also be a plus.
But, I agree. It's can't pwn us and make us a whipping boy forevermore like China could. It has the economics, size, reach, power and influence to domino-flip most of the free world, and bully the rest with force, if not checked.
https://www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/defence/royal-navy-aircraft-carrier-hms-queen-elizabeth-will-have-american-destroyer-bodyguard-south-china-sea-mission-3109662
Heading to Paris:
https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/ze707
That they become the biggest and most successful economy on earth - closing and possibly even reversing the wealth gap with the West.
That they subjugate other nations and minorities within their own borders - e.g. Hong Kong, the Uighurs, parts of Africa.
I'm more concerned about the second. Indeed I'm not sure I'm bothered at all about the first. We have no god-given right to remain many times richer than the developing world. We've had a good run and much of it was based on exploitation of those now seeking to catch up.
However, given that we simply sell our gilts to the BoE right now and pay ourselves the interest I'm not sure what mileage the idea actually had. We'd be better off getting people to spend their new found savings in the wider economy than on government bonds.
I wondered whether they would be a good idea, but the problem is that it puts the government in competition with the banks for capital from personal savings.
If you want to argue against exploitative nations being the wealthiest, that's a cause to oppose China achieving economic leadership.
I mean, wow. I would respectfully direct you towards @ydoethur's summer school.
Europe (inc EU) 50%
USA 15%
APAC 15% (China about half)
Middle East 5%
ROW 15%
In terms of Europe’s share, it’s no different to 2010 as far as I can tell from some quick eyeballing.
China has grown from around 5% to 7.5% though.
Meanwhile the West did several laps of honour punching the air. Before greedily lusting over the vast profits to be made in China and turning a total blind eye to the nature of the regime.
We learned next to nowt from the Soviet failure. Other than we were right all along.
Maybe we weren't.