Historically if you take the 4 general elections since WW2 after one party had been in power for 10 years or more, as will be the case in 2024, the odds favour a change in government.
That was the case in 1964, 1997 and 2010, the only exception being in 1992 where Major's Tories held on despite some losses to Kinnock's Labour.
The question then is whether Starmer is Wilson 1964 or Cameron 2010 and becomes PM or Kinnock 1992 and he narrowly fails to, unless this government performs disastrously he is unlikely to be Blair 1997, more likely he will win narrowly as Wilson did in 1964 or more likely still become PM after a hung parliament as Cameron did in 2010
The other question is whether the change of governing party has already occurred. Does the voting public regard HMG as a Conservative government since 2010 or has the change from Cameron to May to Boris satisfied any putative demand for change?
It might be that in co-opting the popular parts of Jeremy Corbyn's platform and running against Cameron and May-style Conservatism, Boris already is the change prime minister. I'd not be wagering on 2024 based on historical parallels.
ETA I now see @moonshine has made much the same point in the last few minutes.
Boris is certainly much less of a fiscally conservative PM than Cameron was and is arguably now governing even as a social democrat, he has also delivered Brexit obviously which Cameron opposed and a harder Brexit than May wanted too.
So yes there is something in your point that a change of government has occurred already to some extent
If one really wants to be mischievous, what about Johnson as Major redux? Not (so far) the exhausted Major of 1997, but the triumphant Major of May 1992.
Both took over as PM after the Conservatives had been office for a long time and were struggling.
Both ditched the baggage holding the party down (Poll Tax, Brexit faff).
Both were seen as reaching out in a way that other Tories couldn't. If you weren't around at the time, you might not believe it, but the soapbox thing worked.
Both pulled off remarkable victories against an opposition that wasn't really ready for office. Remember, Major's 14.1 million votes still hasn't been beaten.
Both were, in different ways, masters of the art of persuading people that they were on their side.
There are differences of course. Johnson has been much more ruthless at getting rid of potential bastards before they can cause him trouble.
But in 1992, people were saying the same things that they're saying now; that Britain will become like Japan with a single natural party of government. Ten more glorious Conservative years.
But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder.
For those of us that have followed politics for a long time (and indeed have had an interest in history) your last para is quite powerful:
"But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder."
As you say, people forget the John Major of 1992, and for that matter the John Major of Gulf war 1. Johnson apologists should take note.
By the way, I once met Major, and to my surprise he was genuinely charismatic, and came across as a genuinely nice chap. It was also, mercifully before the news regarding Edwina came out!
Yes, Major was a much underrated PM. He is also the only party leader since universal suffrage in 1918 to win a general election after more than 10 consecutive years of his party in power.
Boris or Sunak would need to match that to be re elected in 2024
Major is a great bloke and all that but catastrophic with regard to: ERM, where we should never have entertained the idea of going in. The ERM was the forerunner of the Euro. If it had never started we would still be in the EU. If we had joined it the outlook is unthinkable.
And Maastricht. From today's perspective the idea of a Treaty in which every person in the EU becomes an EU citizen is big and bold. It ought to have been vetoed immediately to signal what the UKs long term goals were. But if acceptable to a government (and of course real as opposed to tactical opposition only came from the Tory right and a handful of Labour traditionalists) a referendum should have been the minimum qualification.
It has taken decades to sort both nation and Tory party from this sorry mess.
That's all true. But I don't think the ERM and Maastricht are as much Major's fault - they were messes dropped on his lap by Lawson and Howe respectively, and the other pro-European Big Beasts of the Conservative Party. Given where the Party and the country were around 1989-90, it would not have been realistic to expect him to be even a Hague-style eurosceptic, let alone a Faragiste. Major's opponents in the leadership election were Heseltine and Hurd, after all, both even more europhile than he was.
But his clinging to the shattered corpse of our EU membership today, when even Lawson has given that up, is less explicable..
Like Johnson, Major was good at leaving the various factions thinking he sympathised with them, but whereas Johnson achieves this by telling everyone what they want to hear, Major did so by remaining cagey. Appearing to be the least pro-EU of the serious contenders cleverly got him the top job, but he went on to disappoint the sceptics, and his comments during and after the referendum suggest that he has been skilled at keeping his own views hidden when it suited.
I think that's undoubtedly true. Major wasn't quite the ideology vacuum that say Johnson or Blair are. But he had a great poker face. And it's also certainly true that the Conservative Party was much more europhilic in 1990 than it was in 2016, let alone today.
Back when he was a junior minister, a good friend of mine was a civil servant working as part of his team. This friend was always going on about how brilliant Major was, and we had great fun taking the piss out of his genius-complex since Major had next to no public profile and evidenced little brilliance at the time. When he made the top job my friend did get the last laugh. At least for a while.
It is a huge bonus for a politician to be underestimated. Mrs Thatcher, John Major, Theresa May and Boris Johnson have all reaped huge dividends in this way.
The first three undoubtedly had to brave out the critics. I think actually doing so was helpful only for Maggie - she probably was underestimated a number of times, a serial underestimatee. Major simply became a bunker mentality. May gave herself a little time, but actually finished up not seeing that she wasn't PM material.
I don't really think that people have underestimated Boris.
You really don't think people have underestimated Boris?
He's still understimated by many on this site who call him silly names like "clown" or "BoZo" and we had many assuming he simply couldn't become leader of the party or prime minister even when he was polling favourite.
I am pretty sure in private he would acknowledge his public caricature is specifically clown like by design. It is a strength or even a super power of his that shields him from both scandal and scrutiny. Nothing to do with underestimating him at all.
I've never underestimated him as a political brand. It's something we have rarely seen the like of. Blair? Nope. Not the same. Not remotely. He had a brand and it helped him sell the New Labour product. Here, with "Boris", there is nothing to the brand other than himself. The persona. It's both very shallow (content) but at the same time quite deep (the psychology). Books will be written about him and the best ones will be by behavioural scientists not political historians.
He is certainly defying all the normal attributes of true leadership, but this maybe due to circumstance. He reminds me of some young British skiers you see that are totally hopeless in every aspect, but just by good fortune and complete arrogance they still manage to ski to the bottom of a black run unscathed, much to the applause of their British friends, who like them are unable to tell the difference between luck and competence.
It is one measure. I prefer to measure what a PM does in office, rather than winning beauty contests against ugly opponents. Other than the vaccine procurement (luck or good judgement or good advice, who knows) there is very little to commend the current incumbent with even his least appealing forebears.
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Historically if you take the 4 general elections since WW2 after one party had been in power for 10 years or more, as will be the case in 2024, the odds favour a change in government.
That was the case in 1964, 1997 and 2010, the only exception being in 1992 where Major's Tories held on despite some losses to Kinnock's Labour.
The question then is whether Starmer is Wilson 1964 or Cameron 2010 and becomes PM or Kinnock 1992 and he narrowly fails to, unless this government performs disastrously he is unlikely to be Blair 1997, more likely he will win narrowly as Wilson did in 1964 or more likely still become PM after a hung parliament as Cameron did in 2010
The other question is whether the change of governing party has already occurred. Does the voting public regard HMG as a Conservative government since 2010 or has the change from Cameron to May to Boris satisfied any putative demand for change?
It might be that in co-opting the popular parts of Jeremy Corbyn's platform and running against Cameron and May-style Conservatism, Boris already is the change prime minister. I'd not be wagering on 2024 based on historical parallels.
ETA I now see @moonshine has made much the same point in the last few minutes.
Boris is certainly much less of a fiscally conservative PM than Cameron was and is arguably now governing even as a social democrat, he has also delivered Brexit obviously which Cameron opposed and a harder Brexit than May wanted too.
So yes there is something in your point that a change of government has occurred already to some extent
If one really wants to be mischievous, what about Johnson as Major redux? Not (so far) the exhausted Major of 1997, but the triumphant Major of May 1992.
Both took over as PM after the Conservatives had been office for a long time and were struggling.
Both ditched the baggage holding the party down (Poll Tax, Brexit faff).
Both were seen as reaching out in a way that other Tories couldn't. If you weren't around at the time, you might not believe it, but the soapbox thing worked.
Both pulled off remarkable victories against an opposition that wasn't really ready for office. Remember, Major's 14.1 million votes still hasn't been beaten.
Both were, in different ways, masters of the art of persuading people that they were on their side.
There are differences of course. Johnson has been much more ruthless at getting rid of potential bastards before they can cause him trouble.
But in 1992, people were saying the same things that they're saying now; that Britain will become like Japan with a single natural party of government. Ten more glorious Conservative years.
But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder.
For those of us that have followed politics for a long time (and indeed have had an interest in history) your last para is quite powerful:
"But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder."
As you say, people forget the John Major of 1992, and for that matter the John Major of Gulf war 1. Johnson apologists should take note.
By the way, I once met Major, and to my surprise he was genuinely charismatic, and came across as a genuinely nice chap. It was also, mercifully before the news regarding Edwina came out!
Yes, Major was a much underrated PM. He is also the only party leader since universal suffrage in 1918 to win a general election after more than 10 consecutive years of his party in power.
Boris or Sunak would need to match that to be re elected in 2024
Major is a great bloke and all that but catastrophic with regard to: ERM, where we should never have entertained the idea of going in. The ERM was the forerunner of the Euro. If it had never started we would still be in the EU. If we had joined it the outlook is unthinkable.
And Maastricht. From today's perspective the idea of a Treaty in which every person in the EU becomes an EU citizen is big and bold. It ought to have been vetoed immediately to signal what the UKs long term goals were. But if acceptable to a government (and of course real as opposed to tactical opposition only came from the Tory right and a handful of Labour traditionalists) a referendum should have been the minimum qualification.
It has taken decades to sort both nation and Tory party from this sorry mess.
That's all true. But I don't think the ERM and Maastricht are as much Major's fault - they were messes dropped on his lap by Lawson and Howe respectively, and the other pro-European Big Beasts of the Conservative Party. Given where the Party and the country were around 1989-90, it would not have been realistic to expect him to be even a Hague-style eurosceptic, let alone a Faragiste. Major's opponents in the leadership election were Heseltine and Hurd, after all, both even more europhile than he was.
But his clinging to the shattered corpse of our EU membership today, when even Lawson has given that up, is less explicable..
Like Johnson, Major was good at leaving the various factions thinking he sympathised with them, but whereas Johnson achieves this by telling everyone what they want to hear, Major did so by remaining cagey. Appearing to be the least pro-EU of the serious contenders cleverly got him the top job, but he went on to disappoint the sceptics, and his comments during and after the referendum suggest that he has been skilled at keeping his own views hidden when it suited.
I think that's undoubtedly true. Major wasn't quite the ideology vacuum that say Johnson or Blair are. But he had a great poker face. And it's also certainly true that the Conservative Party was much more europhilic in 1990 than it was in 2016, let alone today.
Back when he was a junior minister, a good friend of mine was a civil servant working as part of his team. This friend was always going on about how brilliant Major was, and we had great fun taking the piss out of his genius-complex since Major had next to no public profile and evidenced little brilliance at the time. When he made the top job my friend did get the last laugh. At least for a while.
It is a huge bonus for a politician to be underestimated. Mrs Thatcher, John Major, Theresa May and Boris Johnson have all reaped huge dividends in this way.
The first three undoubtedly had to brave out the critics. I think actually doing so was helpful only for Maggie - she probably was underestimated a number of times, a serial underestimatee. Major simply became a bunker mentality. May gave herself a little time, but actually finished up not seeing that she wasn't PM material.
I don't really think that people have underestimated Boris.
A lot depends upon how Boris’s story ends. PMs’ stories usually end badly, and in his case the potential for it to end very badly indeed remains considerable.
Has any story ended worse than David Cameron's? Possibly not since Eden.
How's about Stanley Baldwin?
When David Cameron was Prime Minister, he reminded me most strongly of Baldwin. And nothing has changed that view. Both had moments of near-greatness, marred by instances of extreme political & policy cluelessness.
As for endings, when he left office Stanley Baldwin was acclaimed as some kind of wonder-worker, for example for easing Edward VIII off the throne without (too much) fuss & mess.
However, when WWII broke out AND the Blitz began, he quickly morphed into a public hate object, blamed (with some justice) for Britain's shocking lack of preparedness.
Historically if you take the 4 general elections since WW2 after one party had been in power for 10 years or more, as will be the case in 2024, the odds favour a change in government.
That was the case in 1964, 1997 and 2010, the only exception being in 1992 where Major's Tories held on despite some losses to Kinnock's Labour.
The question then is whether Starmer is Wilson 1964 or Cameron 2010 and becomes PM or Kinnock 1992 and he narrowly fails to, unless this government performs disastrously he is unlikely to be Blair 1997, more likely he will win narrowly as Wilson did in 1964 or more likely still become PM after a hung parliament as Cameron did in 2010
The other question is whether the change of governing party has already occurred. Does the voting public regard HMG as a Conservative government since 2010 or has the change from Cameron to May to Boris satisfied any putative demand for change?
It might be that in co-opting the popular parts of Jeremy Corbyn's platform and running against Cameron and May-style Conservatism, Boris already is the change prime minister. I'd not be wagering on 2024 based on historical parallels.
ETA I now see @moonshine has made much the same point in the last few minutes.
Boris is certainly much less of a fiscally conservative PM than Cameron was and is arguably now governing even as a social democrat, he has also delivered Brexit obviously which Cameron opposed and a harder Brexit than May wanted too.
So yes there is something in your point that a change of government has occurred already to some extent
If one really wants to be mischievous, what about Johnson as Major redux? Not (so far) the exhausted Major of 1997, but the triumphant Major of May 1992.
Both took over as PM after the Conservatives had been office for a long time and were struggling.
Both ditched the baggage holding the party down (Poll Tax, Brexit faff).
Both were seen as reaching out in a way that other Tories couldn't. If you weren't around at the time, you might not believe it, but the soapbox thing worked.
Both pulled off remarkable victories against an opposition that wasn't really ready for office. Remember, Major's 14.1 million votes still hasn't been beaten.
Both were, in different ways, masters of the art of persuading people that they were on their side.
There are differences of course. Johnson has been much more ruthless at getting rid of potential bastards before they can cause him trouble.
But in 1992, people were saying the same things that they're saying now; that Britain will become like Japan with a single natural party of government. Ten more glorious Conservative years.
But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder.
For those of us that have followed politics for a long time (and indeed have had an interest in history) your last para is quite powerful:
"But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder."
As you say, people forget the John Major of 1992, and for that matter the John Major of Gulf war 1. Johnson apologists should take note.
By the way, I once met Major, and to my surprise he was genuinely charismatic, and came across as a genuinely nice chap. It was also, mercifully before the news regarding Edwina came out!
Yes, Major was a much underrated PM. He is also the only party leader since universal suffrage in 1918 to win a general election after more than 10 consecutive years of his party in power.
Boris or Sunak would need to match that to be re elected in 2024
Major is a great bloke and all that but catastrophic with regard to: ERM, where we should never have entertained the idea of going in. The ERM was the forerunner of the Euro. If it had never started we would still be in the EU. If we had joined it the outlook is unthinkable.
And Maastricht. From today's perspective the idea of a Treaty in which every person in the EU becomes an EU citizen is big and bold. It ought to have been vetoed immediately to signal what the UKs long term goals were. But if acceptable to a government (and of course real as opposed to tactical opposition only came from the Tory right and a handful of Labour traditionalists) a referendum should have been the minimum qualification.
It has taken decades to sort both nation and Tory party from this sorry mess.
That's all true. But I don't think the ERM and Maastricht are as much Major's fault - they were messes dropped on his lap by Lawson and Howe respectively, and the other pro-European Big Beasts of the Conservative Party. Given where the Party and the country were around 1989-90, it would not have been realistic to expect him to be even a Hague-style eurosceptic, let alone a Faragiste. Major's opponents in the leadership election were Heseltine and Hurd, after all, both even more europhile than he was.
But his clinging to the shattered corpse of our EU membership today, when even Lawson has given that up, is less explicable..
Like Johnson, Major was good at leaving the various factions thinking he sympathised with them, but whereas Johnson achieves this by telling everyone what they want to hear, Major did so by remaining cagey. Appearing to be the least pro-EU of the serious contenders cleverly got him the top job, but he went on to disappoint the sceptics, and his comments during and after the referendum suggest that he has been skilled at keeping his own views hidden when it suited.
I think that's undoubtedly true. Major wasn't quite the ideology vacuum that say Johnson or Blair are. But he had a great poker face. And it's also certainly true that the Conservative Party was much more europhilic in 1990 than it was in 2016, let alone today.
Back when he was a junior minister, a good friend of mine was a civil servant working as part of his team. This friend was always going on about how brilliant Major was, and we had great fun taking the piss out of his genius-complex since Major had next to no public profile and evidenced little brilliance at the time. When he made the top job my friend did get the last laugh. At least for a while.
It is a huge bonus for a politician to be underestimated. Mrs Thatcher, John Major, Theresa May and Boris Johnson have all reaped huge dividends in this way.
The first three undoubtedly had to brave out the critics. I think actually doing so was helpful only for Maggie - she probably was underestimated a number of times, a serial underestimatee. Major simply became a bunker mentality. May gave herself a little time, but actually finished up not seeing that she wasn't PM material.
I don't really think that people have underestimated Boris.
You really don't think people have underestimated Boris?
He's still understimated by many on this site who call him silly names like "clown" or "BoZo" and we had many assuming he simply couldn't become leader of the party or prime minister even when he was polling favourite.
I am pretty sure in private he would acknowledge his public caricature is specifically clown like by design. It is a strength or even a super power of his that shields him from both scandal and scrutiny. Nothing to do with underestimating him at all.
I've never underestimated him as a political brand. It's something we have rarely seen the like of. Blair? Nope. Not the same. Not remotely. He had a brand and it helped him sell the New Labour product. Here, with "Boris", there is nothing to the brand other than himself. The persona. It's both very shallow (content) but at the same time quite deep (the psychology). Books will be written about him and the best ones will be by behavioural scientists not political historians.
Berlusconi?
That's the comparison that "H" makes. Our one, I mean, not Line of Duty. I don't know enough about Berlusconi (apart from him being a dirty old man and a crook) to say really. I do remember him and Tony with their matching "bandanas" on. Oh dear.
Historically if you take the 4 general elections since WW2 after one party had been in power for 10 years or more, as will be the case in 2024, the odds favour a change in government.
That was the case in 1964, 1997 and 2010, the only exception being in 1992 where Major's Tories held on despite some losses to Kinnock's Labour.
The question then is whether Starmer is Wilson 1964 or Cameron 2010 and becomes PM or Kinnock 1992 and he narrowly fails to, unless this government performs disastrously he is unlikely to be Blair 1997, more likely he will win narrowly as Wilson did in 1964 or more likely still become PM after a hung parliament as Cameron did in 2010
The other question is whether the change of governing party has already occurred. Does the voting public regard HMG as a Conservative government since 2010 or has the change from Cameron to May to Boris satisfied any putative demand for change?
It might be that in co-opting the popular parts of Jeremy Corbyn's platform and running against Cameron and May-style Conservatism, Boris already is the change prime minister. I'd not be wagering on 2024 based on historical parallels.
ETA I now see @moonshine has made much the same point in the last few minutes.
Boris is certainly much less of a fiscally conservative PM than Cameron was and is arguably now governing even as a social democrat, he has also delivered Brexit obviously which Cameron opposed and a harder Brexit than May wanted too.
So yes there is something in your point that a change of government has occurred already to some extent
If one really wants to be mischievous, what about Johnson as Major redux? Not (so far) the exhausted Major of 1997, but the triumphant Major of May 1992.
Both took over as PM after the Conservatives had been office for a long time and were struggling.
Both ditched the baggage holding the party down (Poll Tax, Brexit faff).
Both were seen as reaching out in a way that other Tories couldn't. If you weren't around at the time, you might not believe it, but the soapbox thing worked.
Both pulled off remarkable victories against an opposition that wasn't really ready for office. Remember, Major's 14.1 million votes still hasn't been beaten.
Both were, in different ways, masters of the art of persuading people that they were on their side.
There are differences of course. Johnson has been much more ruthless at getting rid of potential bastards before they can cause him trouble.
But in 1992, people were saying the same things that they're saying now; that Britain will become like Japan with a single natural party of government. Ten more glorious Conservative years.
But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder.
For those of us that have followed politics for a long time (and indeed have had an interest in history) your last para is quite powerful:
"But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder."
As you say, people forget the John Major of 1992, and for that matter the John Major of Gulf war 1. Johnson apologists should take note.
By the way, I once met Major, and to my surprise he was genuinely charismatic, and came across as a genuinely nice chap. It was also, mercifully before the news regarding Edwina came out!
Yes, Major was a much underrated PM. He is also the only party leader since universal suffrage in 1918 to win a general election after more than 10 consecutive years of his party in power.
Boris or Sunak would need to match that to be re elected in 2024
Major is a great bloke and all that but catastrophic with regard to: ERM, where we should never have entertained the idea of going in. The ERM was the forerunner of the Euro. If it had never started we would still be in the EU. If we had joined it the outlook is unthinkable.
And Maastricht. From today's perspective the idea of a Treaty in which every person in the EU becomes an EU citizen is big and bold. It ought to have been vetoed immediately to signal what the UKs long term goals were. But if acceptable to a government (and of course real as opposed to tactical opposition only came from the Tory right and a handful of Labour traditionalists) a referendum should have been the minimum qualification.
It has taken decades to sort both nation and Tory party from this sorry mess.
That's all true. But I don't think the ERM and Maastricht are as much Major's fault - they were messes dropped on his lap by Lawson and Howe respectively, and the other pro-European Big Beasts of the Conservative Party. Given where the Party and the country were around 1989-90, it would not have been realistic to expect him to be even a Hague-style eurosceptic, let alone a Faragiste. Major's opponents in the leadership election were Heseltine and Hurd, after all, both even more europhile than he was.
But his clinging to the shattered corpse of our EU membership today, when even Lawson has given that up, is less explicable..
Like Johnson, Major was good at leaving the various factions thinking he sympathised with them, but whereas Johnson achieves this by telling everyone what they want to hear, Major did so by remaining cagey. Appearing to be the least pro-EU of the serious contenders cleverly got him the top job, but he went on to disappoint the sceptics, and his comments during and after the referendum suggest that he has been skilled at keeping his own views hidden when it suited.
I think that's undoubtedly true. Major wasn't quite the ideology vacuum that say Johnson or Blair are. But he had a great poker face. And it's also certainly true that the Conservative Party was much more europhilic in 1990 than it was in 2016, let alone today.
Back when he was a junior minister, a good friend of mine was a civil servant working as part of his team. This friend was always going on about how brilliant Major was, and we had great fun taking the piss out of his genius-complex since Major had next to no public profile and evidenced little brilliance at the time. When he made the top job my friend did get the last laugh. At least for a while.
It is a huge bonus for a politician to be underestimated. Mrs Thatcher, John Major, Theresa May and Boris Johnson have all reaped huge dividends in this way.
The first three undoubtedly had to brave out the critics. I think actually doing so was helpful only for Maggie - she probably was underestimated a number of times, a serial underestimatee. Major simply became a bunker mentality. May gave herself a little time, but actually finished up not seeing that she wasn't PM material.
I don't really think that people have underestimated Boris.
You really don't think people have underestimated Boris?
He's still understimated by many on this site who call him silly names like "clown" or "BoZo" and we had many assuming he simply couldn't become leader of the party or prime minister even when he was polling favourite.
I am pretty sure in private he would acknowledge his public caricature is specifically clown like by design. It is a strength or even a super power of his that shields him from both scandal and scrutiny. Nothing to do with underestimating him at all.
I've never underestimated him as a political brand. It's something we have rarely seen the like of. Blair? Nope. Not the same. Not remotely. He had a brand and it helped him sell the New Labour product. Here, with "Boris", there is nothing to the brand other than himself. The persona. It's both very shallow (content) but at the same time quite deep (the psychology). Books will be written about him and the best ones will be by behavioural scientists not political historians.
He is certainly defying all the normal attributes of true leadership, but this maybe due to circumstance. He reminds me of some young British skiers you see that are totally hopeless in every aspect, but just by good fortune and complete arrogance they still manage to ski to the bottom of a black run unscathed, much to the applause of their British friends, who like them are unable to tell the difference between luck and competence.
It is one measure. I prefer to measure what a PM does in office, rather than winning beauty contests against ugly opponents. Other than the vaccine procurement (luck or good judgement or good advice, who knows) there is very little to commend the current incumbent with even his least appealing forebears.
The vaccine deployment is the daughter who knows her father f***s up everything he touches, so she pleads with him not to organise her wedding until, eventually, he relents and calls in a professional wedding organiser, who goes away and without interference does a grand job. Yes, the father deserves credit for listening and for taking her advice, but the episode doesn’t reveal any other personal skills of the father and afterwards he is no more qualified to be trusted with anything himself than he was before.
Historically if you take the 4 general elections since WW2 after one party had been in power for 10 years or more, as will be the case in 2024, the odds favour a change in government.
That was the case in 1964, 1997 and 2010, the only exception being in 1992 where Major's Tories held on despite some losses to Kinnock's Labour.
The question then is whether Starmer is Wilson 1964 or Cameron 2010 and becomes PM or Kinnock 1992 and he narrowly fails to, unless this government performs disastrously he is unlikely to be Blair 1997, more likely he will win narrowly as Wilson did in 1964 or more likely still become PM after a hung parliament as Cameron did in 2010
The other question is whether the change of governing party has already occurred. Does the voting public regard HMG as a Conservative government since 2010 or has the change from Cameron to May to Boris satisfied any putative demand for change?
It might be that in co-opting the popular parts of Jeremy Corbyn's platform and running against Cameron and May-style Conservatism, Boris already is the change prime minister. I'd not be wagering on 2024 based on historical parallels.
ETA I now see @moonshine has made much the same point in the last few minutes.
Boris is certainly much less of a fiscally conservative PM than Cameron was and is arguably now governing even as a social democrat, he has also delivered Brexit obviously which Cameron opposed and a harder Brexit than May wanted too.
So yes there is something in your point that a change of government has occurred already to some extent
If one really wants to be mischievous, what about Johnson as Major redux? Not (so far) the exhausted Major of 1997, but the triumphant Major of May 1992.
Both took over as PM after the Conservatives had been office for a long time and were struggling.
Both ditched the baggage holding the party down (Poll Tax, Brexit faff).
Both were seen as reaching out in a way that other Tories couldn't. If you weren't around at the time, you might not believe it, but the soapbox thing worked.
Both pulled off remarkable victories against an opposition that wasn't really ready for office. Remember, Major's 14.1 million votes still hasn't been beaten.
Both were, in different ways, masters of the art of persuading people that they were on their side.
There are differences of course. Johnson has been much more ruthless at getting rid of potential bastards before they can cause him trouble.
But in 1992, people were saying the same things that they're saying now; that Britain will become like Japan with a single natural party of government. Ten more glorious Conservative years.
But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder.
For those of us that have followed politics for a long time (and indeed have had an interest in history) your last para is quite powerful:
"But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder."
As you say, people forget the John Major of 1992, and for that matter the John Major of Gulf war 1. Johnson apologists should take note.
By the way, I once met Major, and to my surprise he was genuinely charismatic, and came across as a genuinely nice chap. It was also, mercifully before the news regarding Edwina came out!
Yes, Major was a much underrated PM. He is also the only party leader since universal suffrage in 1918 to win a general election after more than 10 consecutive years of his party in power.
Boris or Sunak would need to match that to be re elected in 2024
Major is a great bloke and all that but catastrophic with regard to: ERM, where we should never have entertained the idea of going in. The ERM was the forerunner of the Euro. If it had never started we would still be in the EU. If we had joined it the outlook is unthinkable.
And Maastricht. From today's perspective the idea of a Treaty in which every person in the EU becomes an EU citizen is big and bold. It ought to have been vetoed immediately to signal what the UKs long term goals were. But if acceptable to a government (and of course real as opposed to tactical opposition only came from the Tory right and a handful of Labour traditionalists) a referendum should have been the minimum qualification.
It has taken decades to sort both nation and Tory party from this sorry mess.
That's all true. But I don't think the ERM and Maastricht are as much Major's fault - they were messes dropped on his lap by Lawson and Howe respectively, and the other pro-European Big Beasts of the Conservative Party. Given where the Party and the country were around 1989-90, it would not have been realistic to expect him to be even a Hague-style eurosceptic, let alone a Faragiste. Major's opponents in the leadership election were Heseltine and Hurd, after all, both even more europhile than he was.
But his clinging to the shattered corpse of our EU membership today, when even Lawson has given that up, is less explicable..
Like Johnson, Major was good at leaving the various factions thinking he sympathised with them, but whereas Johnson achieves this by telling everyone what they want to hear, Major did so by remaining cagey. Appearing to be the least pro-EU of the serious contenders cleverly got him the top job, but he went on to disappoint the sceptics, and his comments during and after the referendum suggest that he has been skilled at keeping his own views hidden when it suited.
I think that's undoubtedly true. Major wasn't quite the ideology vacuum that say Johnson or Blair are. But he had a great poker face. And it's also certainly true that the Conservative Party was much more europhilic in 1990 than it was in 2016, let alone today.
Back when he was a junior minister, a good friend of mine was a civil servant working as part of his team. This friend was always going on about how brilliant Major was, and we had great fun taking the piss out of his genius-complex since Major had next to no public profile and evidenced little brilliance at the time. When he made the top job my friend did get the last laugh. At least for a while.
It is a huge bonus for a politician to be underestimated. Mrs Thatcher, John Major, Theresa May and Boris Johnson have all reaped huge dividends in this way.
The first three undoubtedly had to brave out the critics. I think actually doing so was helpful only for Maggie - she probably was underestimated a number of times, a serial underestimatee. Major simply became a bunker mentality. May gave herself a little time, but actually finished up not seeing that she wasn't PM material.
I don't really think that people have underestimated Boris.
A lot depends upon how Boris’s story ends. PMs’ stories usually end badly, and in his case the potential for it to end very badly indeed remains considerable.
Has any story ended worse than David Cameron's? Possibly not since Eden.
Historically if you take the 4 general elections since WW2 after one party had been in power for 10 years or more, as will be the case in 2024, the odds favour a change in government.
That was the case in 1964, 1997 and 2010, the only exception being in 1992 where Major's Tories held on despite some losses to Kinnock's Labour.
The question then is whether Starmer is Wilson 1964 or Cameron 2010 and becomes PM or Kinnock 1992 and he narrowly fails to, unless this government performs disastrously he is unlikely to be Blair 1997, more likely he will win narrowly as Wilson did in 1964 or more likely still become PM after a hung parliament as Cameron did in 2010
The other question is whether the change of governing party has already occurred. Does the voting public regard HMG as a Conservative government since 2010 or has the change from Cameron to May to Boris satisfied any putative demand for change?
It might be that in co-opting the popular parts of Jeremy Corbyn's platform and running against Cameron and May-style Conservatism, Boris already is the change prime minister. I'd not be wagering on 2024 based on historical parallels.
ETA I now see @moonshine has made much the same point in the last few minutes.
Boris is certainly much less of a fiscally conservative PM than Cameron was and is arguably now governing even as a social democrat, he has also delivered Brexit obviously which Cameron opposed and a harder Brexit than May wanted too.
So yes there is something in your point that a change of government has occurred already to some extent
If one really wants to be mischievous, what about Johnson as Major redux? Not (so far) the exhausted Major of 1997, but the triumphant Major of May 1992.
Both took over as PM after the Conservatives had been office for a long time and were struggling.
Both ditched the baggage holding the party down (Poll Tax, Brexit faff).
Both were seen as reaching out in a way that other Tories couldn't. If you weren't around at the time, you might not believe it, but the soapbox thing worked.
Both pulled off remarkable victories against an opposition that wasn't really ready for office. Remember, Major's 14.1 million votes still hasn't been beaten.
Both were, in different ways, masters of the art of persuading people that they were on their side.
There are differences of course. Johnson has been much more ruthless at getting rid of potential bastards before they can cause him trouble.
But in 1992, people were saying the same things that they're saying now; that Britain will become like Japan with a single natural party of government. Ten more glorious Conservative years.
But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder.
For those of us that have followed politics for a long time (and indeed have had an interest in history) your last para is quite powerful:
"But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder."
As you say, people forget the John Major of 1992, and for that matter the John Major of Gulf war 1. Johnson apologists should take note.
By the way, I once met Major, and to my surprise he was genuinely charismatic, and came across as a genuinely nice chap. It was also, mercifully before the news regarding Edwina came out!
Yes, Major was a much underrated PM. He is also the only party leader since universal suffrage in 1918 to win a general election after more than 10 consecutive years of his party in power.
Boris or Sunak would need to match that to be re elected in 2024
Major is a great bloke and all that but catastrophic with regard to: ERM, where we should never have entertained the idea of going in. The ERM was the forerunner of the Euro. If it had never started we would still be in the EU. If we had joined it the outlook is unthinkable.
And Maastricht. From today's perspective the idea of a Treaty in which every person in the EU becomes an EU citizen is big and bold. It ought to have been vetoed immediately to signal what the UKs long term goals were. But if acceptable to a government (and of course real as opposed to tactical opposition only came from the Tory right and a handful of Labour traditionalists) a referendum should have been the minimum qualification.
It has taken decades to sort both nation and Tory party from this sorry mess.
That's all true. But I don't think the ERM and Maastricht are as much Major's fault - they were messes dropped on his lap by Lawson and Howe respectively, and the other pro-European Big Beasts of the Conservative Party. Given where the Party and the country were around 1989-90, it would not have been realistic to expect him to be even a Hague-style eurosceptic, let alone a Faragiste. Major's opponents in the leadership election were Heseltine and Hurd, after all, both even more europhile than he was.
But his clinging to the shattered corpse of our EU membership today, when even Lawson has given that up, is less explicable..
Like Johnson, Major was good at leaving the various factions thinking he sympathised with them, but whereas Johnson achieves this by telling everyone what they want to hear, Major did so by remaining cagey. Appearing to be the least pro-EU of the serious contenders cleverly got him the top job, but he went on to disappoint the sceptics, and his comments during and after the referendum suggest that he has been skilled at keeping his own views hidden when it suited.
I think that's undoubtedly true. Major wasn't quite the ideology vacuum that say Johnson or Blair are. But he had a great poker face. And it's also certainly true that the Conservative Party was much more europhilic in 1990 than it was in 2016, let alone today.
Back when he was a junior minister, a good friend of mine was a civil servant working as part of his team. This friend was always going on about how brilliant Major was, and we had great fun taking the piss out of his genius-complex since Major had next to no public profile and evidenced little brilliance at the time. When he made the top job my friend did get the last laugh. At least for a while.
It is a huge bonus for a politician to be underestimated. Mrs Thatcher, John Major, Theresa May and Boris Johnson have all reaped huge dividends in this way.
The first three undoubtedly had to brave out the critics. I think actually doing so was helpful only for Maggie - she probably was underestimated a number of times, a serial underestimatee. Major simply became a bunker mentality. May gave herself a little time, but actually finished up not seeing that she wasn't PM material.
I don't really think that people have underestimated Boris.
You really don't think people have underestimated Boris?
He's still understimated by many on this site who call him silly names like "clown" or "BoZo" and we had many assuming he simply couldn't become leader of the party or prime minister even when he was polling favourite.
I am pretty sure in private he would acknowledge his public caricature is specifically clown like by design. It is a strength or even a super power of his that shields him from both scandal and scrutiny. Nothing to do with underestimating him at all.
But that's the point it's a caricature.
Those who are gullible enough to buy into the caricature and take it at face value are guilty of underestimating him. And falling for his caricature.
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Reparations from WWI played a big part in creating Nazism. They are an incredibly dangerous evil.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
Thank you very much @AnneJGP and everyone else who have posted congratulations since my last acknowledgment.
I'm very much looking forward to getting stuck in.
Getting going - a start - can be the hardest thing too. My son had a difficult time post grad finding anything with prospects. Did eventually but it was a worrying period. Longer it goes on, harder it gets. So, yes, nice one. All a piece of cake from here.
Why would you give such crap advice? Although I appreciate you must have been affected with your son but leave that baggage at home. So to speak.
@Gallowgate - when you are starting out in a new career your every move must be made on the assumption that 20 people are after your job and have interviewed for it that morning.
Nope. Getting "in" can be the biggest hurdle of all. Perfectly serious and sincere comment. Phrasing of the last bit was obviously (I'd hope) light hearted.
Stop trying to be "wise" and bossy. You not in the army now.
It's difficult not to appear wise when discussing stuff with you.
I'll try though, promise.
- Wise is actually fine. But not bossy. Try not to be so bossy.
Bet you were a full Colonel, weren't you?
Excellent. A bet. We are on PB after all. How much?
Yikes, even higher?
Maybe best if I don't know then. It'll get in the way.
"Bet you were a full Colonel, weren't you?"
How much?
I sense you're dying to tell me now! But you've missed the moment. Will the chance come again? It might.
"Bet you were a full Colonel, weren't you?"
We happen to be on a betting site. How much?
You're being a little odd now. How much what for what?
How much?
If you have decided against that's fine just say so.
You seem to have gone all weird, Colonel Topping. I'm getting a bit scared now.
So I take it you are backing out of your proposed bet. No shame in that. We'll leave it there.
We can but we don't have to.
If instead of just repeatedly barking "how much?" you were to frame the bet (around your army rank) you're thinking off, we can do it for a modest sum if we both like the look of it.
It needs to come from you because it's about your personal info and I don't want to be striking the wrong note. I like the old banter but I also like to be sensitive to people.
£1,000 that I wasn't a full colonel.
If I was I pay you £1,000; if I wasn't you pay me £1,000.
Hang on, you already know the answer! That sounds like I very likely end up a grand in the hole.
We can do something fairer and more interesting and for less money. A spread bet.
FM Gen Lt Gen Maj Gen Brig Colonel Lt Col Maj Capt Lt 2Lt OCdt
I "buy" you at Colonel for £1 a rank.
Profit or loss to site funds.
Yes?
LOL it was you who offered the bet in the first place. You presumably realised I knew my own rank at the time.
And wait a minute - you think I was an officer?!!?
Just kidding - my evident lack of common sense gives me away as one. Or an ex-one.
But £1 a rank sounds a bit miserly for a noted denizen of NW3. Make it £5 and write out a cheque to Mike for £15 (= most dashing rank) and I'll be happy to match it.
Right you are, CAPTAIN. See, I'm on the ball.
And mental note never to use the word "bet" colloquially when talking to you.
I picture Warren Beatty calling up Carly Simon soon as he heard the song and going, "How much?"
6.5/10 for recovery. Room for improvement.
But you're right: It's ridiculous to take the word bet literally on a site...whose...only ...... stated......... purpose............ is............. to...
... idle away one's late middle age until a better alternative occurs to one.
Historically if you take the 4 general elections since WW2 after one party had been in power for 10 years or more, as will be the case in 2024, the odds favour a change in government.
That was the case in 1964, 1997 and 2010, the only exception being in 1992 where Major's Tories held on despite some losses to Kinnock's Labour.
The question then is whether Starmer is Wilson 1964 or Cameron 2010 and becomes PM or Kinnock 1992 and he narrowly fails to, unless this government performs disastrously he is unlikely to be Blair 1997, more likely he will win narrowly as Wilson did in 1964 or more likely still become PM after a hung parliament as Cameron did in 2010
The other question is whether the change of governing party has already occurred. Does the voting public regard HMG as a Conservative government since 2010 or has the change from Cameron to May to Boris satisfied any putative demand for change?
It might be that in co-opting the popular parts of Jeremy Corbyn's platform and running against Cameron and May-style Conservatism, Boris already is the change prime minister. I'd not be wagering on 2024 based on historical parallels.
ETA I now see @moonshine has made much the same point in the last few minutes.
Boris is certainly much less of a fiscally conservative PM than Cameron was and is arguably now governing even as a social democrat, he has also delivered Brexit obviously which Cameron opposed and a harder Brexit than May wanted too.
So yes there is something in your point that a change of government has occurred already to some extent
If one really wants to be mischievous, what about Johnson as Major redux? Not (so far) the exhausted Major of 1997, but the triumphant Major of May 1992.
Both took over as PM after the Conservatives had been office for a long time and were struggling.
Both ditched the baggage holding the party down (Poll Tax, Brexit faff).
Both were seen as reaching out in a way that other Tories couldn't. If you weren't around at the time, you might not believe it, but the soapbox thing worked.
Both pulled off remarkable victories against an opposition that wasn't really ready for office. Remember, Major's 14.1 million votes still hasn't been beaten.
Both were, in different ways, masters of the art of persuading people that they were on their side.
There are differences of course. Johnson has been much more ruthless at getting rid of potential bastards before they can cause him trouble.
But in 1992, people were saying the same things that they're saying now; that Britain will become like Japan with a single natural party of government. Ten more glorious Conservative years.
But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder.
For those of us that have followed politics for a long time (and indeed have had an interest in history) your last para is quite powerful:
"But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder."
As you say, people forget the John Major of 1992, and for that matter the John Major of Gulf war 1. Johnson apologists should take note.
By the way, I once met Major, and to my surprise he was genuinely charismatic, and came across as a genuinely nice chap. It was also, mercifully before the news regarding Edwina came out!
Yes, Major was a much underrated PM. He is also the only party leader since universal suffrage in 1918 to win a general election after more than 10 consecutive years of his party in power.
Boris or Sunak would need to match that to be re elected in 2024
Major is a great bloke and all that but catastrophic with regard to: ERM, where we should never have entertained the idea of going in. The ERM was the forerunner of the Euro. If it had never started we would still be in the EU. If we had joined it the outlook is unthinkable.
And Maastricht. From today's perspective the idea of a Treaty in which every person in the EU becomes an EU citizen is big and bold. It ought to have been vetoed immediately to signal what the UKs long term goals were. But if acceptable to a government (and of course real as opposed to tactical opposition only came from the Tory right and a handful of Labour traditionalists) a referendum should have been the minimum qualification.
It has taken decades to sort both nation and Tory party from this sorry mess.
That's all true. But I don't think the ERM and Maastricht are as much Major's fault - they were messes dropped on his lap by Lawson and Howe respectively, and the other pro-European Big Beasts of the Conservative Party. Given where the Party and the country were around 1989-90, it would not have been realistic to expect him to be even a Hague-style eurosceptic, let alone a Faragiste. Major's opponents in the leadership election were Heseltine and Hurd, after all, both even more europhile than he was.
But his clinging to the shattered corpse of our EU membership today, when even Lawson has given that up, is less explicable..
Like Johnson, Major was good at leaving the various factions thinking he sympathised with them, but whereas Johnson achieves this by telling everyone what they want to hear, Major did so by remaining cagey. Appearing to be the least pro-EU of the serious contenders cleverly got him the top job, but he went on to disappoint the sceptics, and his comments during and after the referendum suggest that he has been skilled at keeping his own views hidden when it suited.
I think that's undoubtedly true. Major wasn't quite the ideology vacuum that say Johnson or Blair are. But he had a great poker face. And it's also certainly true that the Conservative Party was much more europhilic in 1990 than it was in 2016, let alone today.
Back when he was a junior minister, a good friend of mine was a civil servant working as part of his team. This friend was always going on about how brilliant Major was, and we had great fun taking the piss out of his genius-complex since Major had next to no public profile and evidenced little brilliance at the time. When he made the top job my friend did get the last laugh. At least for a while.
It is a huge bonus for a politician to be underestimated. Mrs Thatcher, John Major, Theresa May and Boris Johnson have all reaped huge dividends in this way.
The first three undoubtedly had to brave out the critics. I think actually doing so was helpful only for Maggie - she probably was underestimated a number of times, a serial underestimatee. Major simply became a bunker mentality. May gave herself a little time, but actually finished up not seeing that she wasn't PM material.
I don't really think that people have underestimated Boris.
You really don't think people have underestimated Boris?
He's still understimated by many on this site who call him silly names like "clown" or "BoZo" and we had many assuming he simply couldn't become leader of the party or prime minister even when he was polling favourite.
I am pretty sure in private he would acknowledge his public caricature is specifically clown like by design. It is a strength or even a super power of his that shields him from both scandal and scrutiny. Nothing to do with underestimating him at all.
I've never underestimated him as a political brand. It's something we have rarely seen the like of. Blair? Nope. Not the same. Not remotely. He had a brand and it helped him sell the New Labour product. Here, with "Boris", there is nothing to the brand other than himself. The persona. It's both very shallow (content) but at the same time quite deep (the psychology). Books will be written about him and the best ones will be by behavioural scientists not political historians.
He is certainly defying all the normal attributes of true leadership, but this maybe due to circumstance. He reminds me of some young British skiers you see that are totally hopeless in every aspect, but just by good fortune and complete arrogance they still manage to ski to the bottom of a black run unscathed, much to the applause of their British friends, who like them are unable to tell the difference between luck and competence.
It is one measure. I prefer to measure what a PM does in office, rather than winning beauty contests against ugly opponents. Other than the vaccine procurement (luck or good judgement or good advice, who knows) there is very little to commend the current incumbent with even his least appealing forebears.
How about getting a Brexit deal that could get through Parliament and get us out of the ever extending Article 50 quagmire that May ended in?
Whether you like it or not is a different question. It was an achievement May couldn't get.
Historically if you take the 4 general elections since WW2 after one party had been in power for 10 years or more, as will be the case in 2024, the odds favour a change in government.
That was the case in 1964, 1997 and 2010, the only exception being in 1992 where Major's Tories held on despite some losses to Kinnock's Labour.
The question then is whether Starmer is Wilson 1964 or Cameron 2010 and becomes PM or Kinnock 1992 and he narrowly fails to, unless this government performs disastrously he is unlikely to be Blair 1997, more likely he will win narrowly as Wilson did in 1964 or more likely still become PM after a hung parliament as Cameron did in 2010
The other question is whether the change of governing party has already occurred. Does the voting public regard HMG as a Conservative government since 2010 or has the change from Cameron to May to Boris satisfied any putative demand for change?
It might be that in co-opting the popular parts of Jeremy Corbyn's platform and running against Cameron and May-style Conservatism, Boris already is the change prime minister. I'd not be wagering on 2024 based on historical parallels.
ETA I now see @moonshine has made much the same point in the last few minutes.
Boris is certainly much less of a fiscally conservative PM than Cameron was and is arguably now governing even as a social democrat, he has also delivered Brexit obviously which Cameron opposed and a harder Brexit than May wanted too.
So yes there is something in your point that a change of government has occurred already to some extent
If one really wants to be mischievous, what about Johnson as Major redux? Not (so far) the exhausted Major of 1997, but the triumphant Major of May 1992.
Both took over as PM after the Conservatives had been office for a long time and were struggling.
Both ditched the baggage holding the party down (Poll Tax, Brexit faff).
Both were seen as reaching out in a way that other Tories couldn't. If you weren't around at the time, you might not believe it, but the soapbox thing worked.
Both pulled off remarkable victories against an opposition that wasn't really ready for office. Remember, Major's 14.1 million votes still hasn't been beaten.
Both were, in different ways, masters of the art of persuading people that they were on their side.
There are differences of course. Johnson has been much more ruthless at getting rid of potential bastards before they can cause him trouble.
But in 1992, people were saying the same things that they're saying now; that Britain will become like Japan with a single natural party of government. Ten more glorious Conservative years.
But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder.
For those of us that have followed politics for a long time (and indeed have had an interest in history) your last para is quite powerful:
"But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder."
As you say, people forget the John Major of 1992, and for that matter the John Major of Gulf war 1. Johnson apologists should take note.
By the way, I once met Major, and to my surprise he was genuinely charismatic, and came across as a genuinely nice chap. It was also, mercifully before the news regarding Edwina came out!
Yes, Major was a much underrated PM. He is also the only party leader since universal suffrage in 1918 to win a general election after more than 10 consecutive years of his party in power.
Boris or Sunak would need to match that to be re elected in 2024
Major is a great bloke and all that but catastrophic with regard to: ERM, where we should never have entertained the idea of going in. The ERM was the forerunner of the Euro. If it had never started we would still be in the EU. If we had joined it the outlook is unthinkable.
And Maastricht. From today's perspective the idea of a Treaty in which every person in the EU becomes an EU citizen is big and bold. It ought to have been vetoed immediately to signal what the UKs long term goals were. But if acceptable to a government (and of course real as opposed to tactical opposition only came from the Tory right and a handful of Labour traditionalists) a referendum should have been the minimum qualification.
It has taken decades to sort both nation and Tory party from this sorry mess.
That's all true. But I don't think the ERM and Maastricht are as much Major's fault - they were messes dropped on his lap by Lawson and Howe respectively, and the other pro-European Big Beasts of the Conservative Party. Given where the Party and the country were around 1989-90, it would not have been realistic to expect him to be even a Hague-style eurosceptic, let alone a Faragiste. Major's opponents in the leadership election were Heseltine and Hurd, after all, both even more europhile than he was.
But his clinging to the shattered corpse of our EU membership today, when even Lawson has given that up, is less explicable..
Like Johnson, Major was good at leaving the various factions thinking he sympathised with them, but whereas Johnson achieves this by telling everyone what they want to hear, Major did so by remaining cagey. Appearing to be the least pro-EU of the serious contenders cleverly got him the top job, but he went on to disappoint the sceptics, and his comments during and after the referendum suggest that he has been skilled at keeping his own views hidden when it suited.
I think that's undoubtedly true. Major wasn't quite the ideology vacuum that say Johnson or Blair are. But he had a great poker face. And it's also certainly true that the Conservative Party was much more europhilic in 1990 than it was in 2016, let alone today.
Back when he was a junior minister, a good friend of mine was a civil servant working as part of his team. This friend was always going on about how brilliant Major was, and we had great fun taking the piss out of his genius-complex since Major had next to no public profile and evidenced little brilliance at the time. When he made the top job my friend did get the last laugh. At least for a while.
It is a huge bonus for a politician to be underestimated. Mrs Thatcher, John Major, Theresa May and Boris Johnson have all reaped huge dividends in this way.
The first three undoubtedly had to brave out the critics. I think actually doing so was helpful only for Maggie - she probably was underestimated a number of times, a serial underestimatee. Major simply became a bunker mentality. May gave herself a little time, but actually finished up not seeing that she wasn't PM material.
I don't really think that people have underestimated Boris.
You really don't think people have underestimated Boris?
He's still understimated by many on this site who call him silly names like "clown" or "BoZo" and we had many assuming he simply couldn't become leader of the party or prime minister even when he was polling favourite.
I am pretty sure in private he would acknowledge his public caricature is specifically clown like by design. It is a strength or even a super power of his that shields him from both scandal and scrutiny. Nothing to do with underestimating him at all.
I've never underestimated him as a political brand. It's something we have rarely seen the like of. Blair? Nope. Not the same. Not remotely. He had a brand and it helped him sell the New Labour product. Here, with "Boris", there is nothing to the brand other than himself. The persona. It's both very shallow (content) but at the same time quite deep (the psychology). Books will be written about him and the best ones will be by behavioural scientists not political historians.
Berlusconi?
That's the comparison that "H" makes. Our one, I mean, not Line of Duty. I don't know enough about Berlusconi (apart from him being a dirty old man and a crook) to say really. I do remember him and Tony with their matching "bandanas" on. Oh dear.
The comparison, from my very biased view, is that it was remarkable that so many Italians kept on voting for Berlusconi despite the fact that he was making his country into a laughing stock and pariah. The Italians do have the excuse that they are noted for putting more emphasis on presentation than content, which is why they will give you crap presents beautifully wrapped. We Brits are supposed to be more down to Earth folk.
With Johnson, he does seem to have shied away from the worst of his excesses back in the days of Cummings. Whether this continues remains to be seen.
Historically if you take the 4 general elections since WW2 after one party had been in power for 10 years or more, as will be the case in 2024, the odds favour a change in government.
That was the case in 1964, 1997 and 2010, the only exception being in 1992 where Major's Tories held on despite some losses to Kinnock's Labour.
The question then is whether Starmer is Wilson 1964 or Cameron 2010 and becomes PM or Kinnock 1992 and he narrowly fails to, unless this government performs disastrously he is unlikely to be Blair 1997, more likely he will win narrowly as Wilson did in 1964 or more likely still become PM after a hung parliament as Cameron did in 2010
The other question is whether the change of governing party has already occurred. Does the voting public regard HMG as a Conservative government since 2010 or has the change from Cameron to May to Boris satisfied any putative demand for change?
It might be that in co-opting the popular parts of Jeremy Corbyn's platform and running against Cameron and May-style Conservatism, Boris already is the change prime minister. I'd not be wagering on 2024 based on historical parallels.
ETA I now see @moonshine has made much the same point in the last few minutes.
Boris is certainly much less of a fiscally conservative PM than Cameron was and is arguably now governing even as a social democrat, he has also delivered Brexit obviously which Cameron opposed and a harder Brexit than May wanted too.
So yes there is something in your point that a change of government has occurred already to some extent
If one really wants to be mischievous, what about Johnson as Major redux? Not (so far) the exhausted Major of 1997, but the triumphant Major of May 1992.
Both took over as PM after the Conservatives had been office for a long time and were struggling.
Both ditched the baggage holding the party down (Poll Tax, Brexit faff).
Both were seen as reaching out in a way that other Tories couldn't. If you weren't around at the time, you might not believe it, but the soapbox thing worked.
Both pulled off remarkable victories against an opposition that wasn't really ready for office. Remember, Major's 14.1 million votes still hasn't been beaten.
Both were, in different ways, masters of the art of persuading people that they were on their side.
There are differences of course. Johnson has been much more ruthless at getting rid of potential bastards before they can cause him trouble.
But in 1992, people were saying the same things that they're saying now; that Britain will become like Japan with a single natural party of government. Ten more glorious Conservative years.
But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder.
For those of us that have followed politics for a long time (and indeed have had an interest in history) your last para is quite powerful:
"But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder."
As you say, people forget the John Major of 1992, and for that matter the John Major of Gulf war 1. Johnson apologists should take note.
By the way, I once met Major, and to my surprise he was genuinely charismatic, and came across as a genuinely nice chap. It was also, mercifully before the news regarding Edwina came out!
Yes, Major was a much underrated PM. He is also the only party leader since universal suffrage in 1918 to win a general election after more than 10 consecutive years of his party in power.
Boris or Sunak would need to match that to be re elected in 2024
Major is a great bloke and all that but catastrophic with regard to: ERM, where we should never have entertained the idea of going in. The ERM was the forerunner of the Euro. If it had never started we would still be in the EU. If we had joined it the outlook is unthinkable.
And Maastricht. From today's perspective the idea of a Treaty in which every person in the EU becomes an EU citizen is big and bold. It ought to have been vetoed immediately to signal what the UKs long term goals were. But if acceptable to a government (and of course real as opposed to tactical opposition only came from the Tory right and a handful of Labour traditionalists) a referendum should have been the minimum qualification.
It has taken decades to sort both nation and Tory party from this sorry mess.
That's all true. But I don't think the ERM and Maastricht are as much Major's fault - they were messes dropped on his lap by Lawson and Howe respectively, and the other pro-European Big Beasts of the Conservative Party. Given where the Party and the country were around 1989-90, it would not have been realistic to expect him to be even a Hague-style eurosceptic, let alone a Faragiste. Major's opponents in the leadership election were Heseltine and Hurd, after all, both even more europhile than he was.
But his clinging to the shattered corpse of our EU membership today, when even Lawson has given that up, is less explicable..
Like Johnson, Major was good at leaving the various factions thinking he sympathised with them, but whereas Johnson achieves this by telling everyone what they want to hear, Major did so by remaining cagey. Appearing to be the least pro-EU of the serious contenders cleverly got him the top job, but he went on to disappoint the sceptics, and his comments during and after the referendum suggest that he has been skilled at keeping his own views hidden when it suited.
I think that's undoubtedly true. Major wasn't quite the ideology vacuum that say Johnson or Blair are. But he had a great poker face. And it's also certainly true that the Conservative Party was much more europhilic in 1990 than it was in 2016, let alone today.
Back when he was a junior minister, a good friend of mine was a civil servant working as part of his team. This friend was always going on about how brilliant Major was, and we had great fun taking the piss out of his genius-complex since Major had next to no public profile and evidenced little brilliance at the time. When he made the top job my friend did get the last laugh. At least for a while.
It is a huge bonus for a politician to be underestimated. Mrs Thatcher, John Major, Theresa May and Boris Johnson have all reaped huge dividends in this way.
The first three undoubtedly had to brave out the critics. I think actually doing so was helpful only for Maggie - she probably was underestimated a number of times, a serial underestimatee. Major simply became a bunker mentality. May gave herself a little time, but actually finished up not seeing that she wasn't PM material.
I don't really think that people have underestimated Boris.
You really don't think people have underestimated Boris?
He's still understimated by many on this site who call him silly names like "clown" or "BoZo" and we had many assuming he simply couldn't become leader of the party or prime minister even when he was polling favourite.
I am pretty sure in private he would acknowledge his public caricature is specifically clown like by design. It is a strength or even a super power of his that shields him from both scandal and scrutiny. Nothing to do with underestimating him at all.
I've never underestimated him as a political brand. It's something we have rarely seen the like of. Blair? Nope. Not the same. Not remotely. He had a brand and it helped him sell the New Labour product. Here, with "Boris", there is nothing to the brand other than himself. The persona. It's both very shallow (content) but at the same time quite deep (the psychology). Books will be written about him and the best ones will be by behavioural scientists not political historians.
He is certainly defying all the normal attributes of true leadership, but this maybe due to circumstance. He reminds me of some young British skiers you see that are totally hopeless in every aspect, but just by good fortune and complete arrogance they still manage to ski to the bottom of a black run unscathed, much to the applause of their British friends, who like them are unable to tell the difference between luck and competence.
It is one measure. I prefer to measure what a PM does in office, rather than winning beauty contests against ugly opponents. Other than the vaccine procurement (luck or good judgement or good advice, who knows) there is very little to commend the current incumbent with even his least appealing forebears.
The vaccine deployment is the daughter who knows her father f***s up everything he touches, so she pleads with him not to organise her wedding until, eventually, he relents and calls in a professional wedding organiser, who goes away and without interference does a grand job. Yes, the father deserves credit for listening and for taking her advice, but the episode doesn’t reveal any other personal skills of the father and afterwards he is no more qualified to be trusted with anything himself than he was before.
Ah, the contortions you have to perform to avoid a cognitive-dissonance-induced aneurysm. But I suppose you have to do it to escape the reality that the man you so wittily call a clown managed to bring us a vaccine programme that surpassed almost the entirety of the non-clown world...
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Reparations from WWI played a big part in creating Nazism. They are an incredibly dangerous evil.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
The bankruptcy of the German government did, but reparations (which were never actually paid in substantial amounts) had little to do with that. The killer for the German economy was the huge amount of money they had borrowed to pay for the war, which they had intended to repay with money plundered from the countries they conquered. Because they lost, they had to pay for it themselves, and they did not like it. I suppose you could argue the occupation of the Ruhr and hyperinflation were linked to reparations, but that didn’t lead to the rise of Nazism.
If you want to see what a really harsh treaty looks like, check out Brest Litovsk.
Historically if you take the 4 general elections since WW2 after one party had been in power for 10 years or more, as will be the case in 2024, the odds favour a change in government.
That was the case in 1964, 1997 and 2010, the only exception being in 1992 where Major's Tories held on despite some losses to Kinnock's Labour.
The question then is whether Starmer is Wilson 1964 or Cameron 2010 and becomes PM or Kinnock 1992 and he narrowly fails to, unless this government performs disastrously he is unlikely to be Blair 1997, more likely he will win narrowly as Wilson did in 1964 or more likely still become PM after a hung parliament as Cameron did in 2010
The other question is whether the change of governing party has already occurred. Does the voting public regard HMG as a Conservative government since 2010 or has the change from Cameron to May to Boris satisfied any putative demand for change?
It might be that in co-opting the popular parts of Jeremy Corbyn's platform and running against Cameron and May-style Conservatism, Boris already is the change prime minister. I'd not be wagering on 2024 based on historical parallels.
ETA I now see @moonshine has made much the same point in the last few minutes.
Boris is certainly much less of a fiscally conservative PM than Cameron was and is arguably now governing even as a social democrat, he has also delivered Brexit obviously which Cameron opposed and a harder Brexit than May wanted too.
So yes there is something in your point that a change of government has occurred already to some extent
If one really wants to be mischievous, what about Johnson as Major redux? Not (so far) the exhausted Major of 1997, but the triumphant Major of May 1992.
Both took over as PM after the Conservatives had been office for a long time and were struggling.
Both ditched the baggage holding the party down (Poll Tax, Brexit faff).
Both were seen as reaching out in a way that other Tories couldn't. If you weren't around at the time, you might not believe it, but the soapbox thing worked.
Both pulled off remarkable victories against an opposition that wasn't really ready for office. Remember, Major's 14.1 million votes still hasn't been beaten.
Both were, in different ways, masters of the art of persuading people that they were on their side.
There are differences of course. Johnson has been much more ruthless at getting rid of potential bastards before they can cause him trouble.
But in 1992, people were saying the same things that they're saying now; that Britain will become like Japan with a single natural party of government. Ten more glorious Conservative years.
But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder.
For those of us that have followed politics for a long time (and indeed have had an interest in history) your last para is quite powerful:
"But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder."
As you say, people forget the John Major of 1992, and for that matter the John Major of Gulf war 1. Johnson apologists should take note.
By the way, I once met Major, and to my surprise he was genuinely charismatic, and came across as a genuinely nice chap. It was also, mercifully before the news regarding Edwina came out!
Yes, Major was a much underrated PM. He is also the only party leader since universal suffrage in 1918 to win a general election after more than 10 consecutive years of his party in power.
Boris or Sunak would need to match that to be re elected in 2024
Major is a great bloke and all that but catastrophic with regard to: ERM, where we should never have entertained the idea of going in. The ERM was the forerunner of the Euro. If it had never started we would still be in the EU. If we had joined it the outlook is unthinkable.
And Maastricht. From today's perspective the idea of a Treaty in which every person in the EU becomes an EU citizen is big and bold. It ought to have been vetoed immediately to signal what the UKs long term goals were. But if acceptable to a government (and of course real as opposed to tactical opposition only came from the Tory right and a handful of Labour traditionalists) a referendum should have been the minimum qualification.
It has taken decades to sort both nation and Tory party from this sorry mess.
That's all true. But I don't think the ERM and Maastricht are as much Major's fault - they were messes dropped on his lap by Lawson and Howe respectively, and the other pro-European Big Beasts of the Conservative Party. Given where the Party and the country were around 1989-90, it would not have been realistic to expect him to be even a Hague-style eurosceptic, let alone a Faragiste. Major's opponents in the leadership election were Heseltine and Hurd, after all, both even more europhile than he was.
But his clinging to the shattered corpse of our EU membership today, when even Lawson has given that up, is less explicable..
Like Johnson, Major was good at leaving the various factions thinking he sympathised with them, but whereas Johnson achieves this by telling everyone what they want to hear, Major did so by remaining cagey. Appearing to be the least pro-EU of the serious contenders cleverly got him the top job, but he went on to disappoint the sceptics, and his comments during and after the referendum suggest that he has been skilled at keeping his own views hidden when it suited.
I think that's undoubtedly true. Major wasn't quite the ideology vacuum that say Johnson or Blair are. But he had a great poker face. And it's also certainly true that the Conservative Party was much more europhilic in 1990 than it was in 2016, let alone today.
Back when he was a junior minister, a good friend of mine was a civil servant working as part of his team. This friend was always going on about how brilliant Major was, and we had great fun taking the piss out of his genius-complex since Major had next to no public profile and evidenced little brilliance at the time. When he made the top job my friend did get the last laugh. At least for a while.
It is a huge bonus for a politician to be underestimated. Mrs Thatcher, John Major, Theresa May and Boris Johnson have all reaped huge dividends in this way.
The first three undoubtedly had to brave out the critics. I think actually doing so was helpful only for Maggie - she probably was underestimated a number of times, a serial underestimatee. Major simply became a bunker mentality. May gave herself a little time, but actually finished up not seeing that she wasn't PM material.
I don't really think that people have underestimated Boris.
You really don't think people have underestimated Boris?
He's still understimated by many on this site who call him silly names like "clown" or "BoZo" and we had many assuming he simply couldn't become leader of the party or prime minister even when he was polling favourite.
I am pretty sure in private he would acknowledge his public caricature is specifically clown like by design. It is a strength or even a super power of his that shields him from both scandal and scrutiny. Nothing to do with underestimating him at all.
I've never underestimated him as a political brand. It's something we have rarely seen the like of. Blair? Nope. Not the same. Not remotely. He had a brand and it helped him sell the New Labour product. Here, with "Boris", there is nothing to the brand other than himself. The persona. It's both very shallow (content) but at the same time quite deep (the psychology). Books will be written about him and the best ones will be by behavioural scientists not political historians.
He is certainly defying all the normal attributes of true leadership, but this maybe due to circumstance. He reminds me of some young British skiers you see that are totally hopeless in every aspect, but just by good fortune and complete arrogance they still manage to ski to the bottom of a black run unscathed, much to the applause of their British friends, who like them are unable to tell the difference between luck and competence.
It is one measure. I prefer to measure what a PM does in office, rather than winning beauty contests against ugly opponents. Other than the vaccine procurement (luck or good judgement or good advice, who knows) there is very little to commend the current incumbent with even his least appealing forebears.
How about getting a Brexit deal that could get through Parliament and get us out of the ever extending Article 50 quagmire that May ended in?
Whether you like it or not is a different question. It was an achievement May couldn't get.
Yes, obviously he has made plenty of mistakes, but on the big things, I think his record stands up pretty well:
- defeating communism, probably for a generation (not an SNP generation) - getting a Brexit deal that most people seem able to live with, though nobody thinks it's perfect - vaccines (also genetic sequencing)
Not bad for a year and a half.
And I think he's undoubtedly improved since Cummings left.
Thank you very much @AnneJGP and everyone else who have posted congratulations since my last acknowledgment.
I'm very much looking forward to getting stuck in.
Getting going - a start - can be the hardest thing too. My son had a difficult time post grad finding anything with prospects. Did eventually but it was a worrying period. Longer it goes on, harder it gets. So, yes, nice one. All a piece of cake from here.
Why would you give such crap advice? Although I appreciate you must have been affected with your son but leave that baggage at home. So to speak.
@Gallowgate - when you are starting out in a new career your every move must be made on the assumption that 20 people are after your job and have interviewed for it that morning.
Nope. Getting "in" can be the biggest hurdle of all. Perfectly serious and sincere comment. Phrasing of the last bit was obviously (I'd hope) light hearted.
Stop trying to be "wise" and bossy. You not in the army now.
It's difficult not to appear wise when discussing stuff with you.
I'll try though, promise.
- Wise is actually fine. But not bossy. Try not to be so bossy.
Bet you were a full Colonel, weren't you?
Excellent. A bet. We are on PB after all. How much?
Yikes, even higher?
Maybe best if I don't know then. It'll get in the way.
"Bet you were a full Colonel, weren't you?"
How much?
I sense you're dying to tell me now! But you've missed the moment. Will the chance come again? It might.
"Bet you were a full Colonel, weren't you?"
We happen to be on a betting site. How much?
You're being a little odd now. How much what for what?
How much?
If you have decided against that's fine just say so.
You seem to have gone all weird, Colonel Topping. I'm getting a bit scared now.
So I take it you are backing out of your proposed bet. No shame in that. We'll leave it there.
We can but we don't have to.
If instead of just repeatedly barking "how much?" you were to frame the bet (around your army rank) you're thinking off, we can do it for a modest sum if we both like the look of it.
It needs to come from you because it's about your personal info and I don't want to be striking the wrong note. I like the old banter but I also like to be sensitive to people.
£1,000 that I wasn't a full colonel.
If I was I pay you £1,000; if I wasn't you pay me £1,000.
Hang on, you already know the answer! That sounds like I very likely end up a grand in the hole.
We can do something fairer and more interesting and for less money. A spread bet.
FM Gen Lt Gen Maj Gen Brig Colonel Lt Col Maj Capt Lt 2Lt OCdt
I "buy" you at Colonel for £1 a rank.
Profit or loss to site funds.
Yes?
LOL it was you who offered the bet in the first place. You presumably realised I knew my own rank at the time.
And wait a minute - you think I was an officer?!!?
Just kidding - my evident lack of common sense gives me away as one. Or an ex-one.
But £1 a rank sounds a bit miserly for a noted denizen of NW3. Make it £5 and write out a cheque to Mike for £15 (= most dashing rank) and I'll be happy to match it.
Right you are, CAPTAIN. See, I'm on the ball.
And mental note never to use the word "bet" colloquially when talking to you.
I picture Warren Beatty calling up Carly Simon soon as he heard the song and going, "How much?"
6.5/10 for recovery. Room for improvement.
But you're right: It's ridiculous to take the word bet literally on a site...whose...only ...... stated......... purpose............ is............. to...
... idle away one's late middle age until a better alternative occurs to one.
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Reparations from WWI played a big part in creating Nazism. They are an incredibly dangerous evil.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
The bankruptcy of the German government did, but reparations (which were never actually paid in substantial amounts) had little to do with that. The killer for the German economy was the huge amount of money they had borrowed to pay for the war, which they had intended to repay with money plundered from the countries they conquered. Because they lost, they had to pay for it themselves, and they did not like it. I suppose you could argue the occupation of the Ruhr and hyperinflation were linked to reparations, but that didn’t lead to the rise of Nazism.
If you want to see what a really harsh treaty looks like, check out Brest Litovsk.
There was also the issue that the German Army told the German people they were winning, right up until they demanded peace and made a civilian government sign it.
They stabbed themselves in the back :-)
And the peace they promised was a no-score draw, not the loss of the war. So it was considered triply unfair in Germany.
To a certain extent the hyper-inflation was due to trying to inflate away the debt....
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Reparations from WWI played a big part in creating Nazism. They are an incredibly dangerous evil.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
The bankruptcy of the German government did, but reparations (which were never actually paid in substantial amounts) had little to do with that. The killer for the German economy was the huge amount of money they had borrowed to pay for the war, which they had intended to repay with money plundered from the countries they conquered. Because they lost, they had to pay for it themselves, and they did not like it. I suppose you could argue the occupation of the Ruhr and hyperinflation were linked to reparations, but that didn’t lead to the rise of Nazism.
If you want to see what a really harsh treaty looks like, check out Brest Litovsk.
It was John Maynard Keynes who called Versailles a 'Carthaginian peace'. It gave Hitler enormous leverage.
There's the famous cartoon right? with the '1939 cannon fodder boy' and Clemenceau saying 'curious, I can hear a child crying'
Thank you very much @AnneJGP and everyone else who have posted congratulations since my last acknowledgment.
I'm very much looking forward to getting stuck in.
Getting going - a start - can be the hardest thing too. My son had a difficult time post grad finding anything with prospects. Did eventually but it was a worrying period. Longer it goes on, harder it gets. So, yes, nice one. All a piece of cake from here.
Why would you give such crap advice? Although I appreciate you must have been affected with your son but leave that baggage at home. So to speak.
@Gallowgate - when you are starting out in a new career your every move must be made on the assumption that 20 people are after your job and have interviewed for it that morning.
Nope. Getting "in" can be the biggest hurdle of all. Perfectly serious and sincere comment. Phrasing of the last bit was obviously (I'd hope) light hearted.
Stop trying to be "wise" and bossy. You not in the army now.
It's difficult not to appear wise when discussing stuff with you.
I'll try though, promise.
- Wise is actually fine. But not bossy. Try not to be so bossy.
Bet you were a full Colonel, weren't you?
Excellent. A bet. We are on PB after all. How much?
Yikes, even higher?
Maybe best if I don't know then. It'll get in the way.
"Bet you were a full Colonel, weren't you?"
How much?
I sense you're dying to tell me now! But you've missed the moment. Will the chance come again? It might.
"Bet you were a full Colonel, weren't you?"
We happen to be on a betting site. How much?
You're being a little odd now. How much what for what?
How much?
If you have decided against that's fine just say so.
You seem to have gone all weird, Colonel Topping. I'm getting a bit scared now.
So I take it you are backing out of your proposed bet. No shame in that. We'll leave it there.
We can but we don't have to.
If instead of just repeatedly barking "how much?" you were to frame the bet (around your army rank) you're thinking off, we can do it for a modest sum if we both like the look of it.
It needs to come from you because it's about your personal info and I don't want to be striking the wrong note. I like the old banter but I also like to be sensitive to people.
£1,000 that I wasn't a full colonel.
If I was I pay you £1,000; if I wasn't you pay me £1,000.
Hang on, you already know the answer! That sounds like I very likely end up a grand in the hole.
We can do something fairer and more interesting and for less money. A spread bet.
FM Gen Lt Gen Maj Gen Brig Colonel Lt Col Maj Capt Lt 2Lt OCdt
I "buy" you at Colonel for £1 a rank.
Profit or loss to site funds.
Yes?
LOL it was you who offered the bet in the first place. You presumably realised I knew my own rank at the time.
And wait a minute - you think I was an officer?!!?
Just kidding - my evident lack of common sense gives me away as one. Or an ex-one.
But £1 a rank sounds a bit miserly for a noted denizen of NW3. Make it £5 and write out a cheque to Mike for £15 (= most dashing rank) and I'll be happy to match it.
Right you are, CAPTAIN. See, I'm on the ball.
And mental note never to use the word "bet" colloquially when talking to you.
I picture Warren Beatty calling up Carly Simon soon as he heard the song and going, "How much?"
6.5/10 for recovery. Room for improvement.
But you're right: It's ridiculous to take the word bet literally on a site...whose...only ...... stated......... purpose............ is............. to...
... idle away one's late middle age until a better alternative occurs to one.
- Exactly. Nobody believing that self deprecating "Captain" shtick.
Nobody in my family has ever risen to officer rank in the army. Sergeants aplenty, and perhaps towards RSM in one case.
Amazingly, so far as I know, we have no Naval history at all.
There are some elements that sailed as passengers to the colonies though. As here though they've made no great splash.
It's a happy day then when I can chat to the Brigadier as though we're almost equals.
(PS. Topping - I am pulling your leg, and I can't promise not to continue either.)
No army connection at all in mine as far back as I know. One g'dad was too young for WW1 and too old for WW2. The other one was called up for WW1 but got off on account of 'flat feet', meaning couldn't march. The Somme was where he would have headed off to, and of his mates who were lucky enough to have well formed arches most died there.
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Reparations from WWI played a big part in creating Nazism. They are an incredibly dangerous evil.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
The bankruptcy of the German government did, but reparations (which were never actually paid in substantial amounts) had little to do with that. The killer for the German economy was the huge amount of money they had borrowed to pay for the war, which they had intended to repay with money plundered from the countries they conquered. Because they lost, they had to pay for it themselves, and they did not like it. I suppose you could argue the occupation of the Ruhr and hyperinflation were linked to reparations, but that didn’t lead to the rise of Nazism.
If you want to see what a really harsh treaty looks like, check out Brest Litovsk.
It was John Maynard Keynes who called Versailles a 'Carthaginian peace'. It gave Hitler enormous leverage.
There's the famous cartoon right? with the '1939 cannon fodder boy' and Clemenceau saying 'curious, I can hear a child crying'
There are many famous cartoons and sayings. Keynes in fact was principally opposed to reparations for the reason I have given - that due to the indebtedness of Germany there was no realistic prospect of them paying.
My favourite cartoon is of a Junker officer holding a copy of Versailles, apoplectic with fury and shouting ‘why, it’s fully a quarter of what we’d have made them pay if we’d won.’
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
I think the main reason why Germany is so attached to price stability is because they weren't really exposed to the Keynesian revolution that swept England and America in the late 1930s and 1940s, because Germany was isolated from Anglo-Saxon intellectual influence at that time. (In a way, this is odd, because Hitler was of course following extreme Keynesian economic policy to rearm, but Keynes and his followers obviously had no sympathy at all for the Nazis. He once wrote to a German correspondent that he said what he did not to help the Nazis, but to save the world from them).
Mainstream economic thought in Britain and America prized price stability over the level of employment until Keynes (that's an oversimplification, but largely true). Keynes and the Great Depression largely changed those priorities. But Continental Europe in general, and especially Germany, was isolated from Keynesian thought.
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Reparations from WWI played a big part in creating Nazism. They are an incredibly dangerous evil.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
The bankruptcy of the German government did, but reparations (which were never actually paid in substantial amounts) had little to do with that. The killer for the German economy was the huge amount of money they had borrowed to pay for the war, which they had intended to repay with money plundered from the countries they conquered. Because they lost, they had to pay for it themselves, and they did not like it. I suppose you could argue the occupation of the Ruhr and hyperinflation were linked to reparations, but that didn’t lead to the rise of Nazism.
If you want to see what a really harsh treaty looks like, check out Brest Litovsk.
There was also the issue that the German Army told the German people they were winning, right up until they demanded peace and made a civilian government sign it.
They stabbed themselves in the back :-)
And the peace they promised was a no-score draw, not the loss of the war. So it was considered triply unfair in Germany.
To a certain extent the hyper-inflation was due to trying to inflate away the debt....
Again, partly true, and the Dolschtoss myth led to the rise of the Freikorps which caused many problems, to put it mildly, int he early days of Weimar and were the early proving ground for the SA’s most thuggish members.
But if that had been all, Weimar would never have started. There were other problems - for example, the weak and ineffectual democratic systems in place that undermined themselves, and allowed one person to rule by decree under Article 48. Or the corruption of the judiciary. Or the fact that hardly any faction actually supported a democratic system.
Hyperinflation also was partly to help inflate away the debt and boost exports, but it wouldn’t have gone mad in quite the way it did but for the invasion of the Ruhr and the decision of the German government to print money to pay for a general strike.
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Reparations from WWI played a big part in creating Nazism. They are an incredibly dangerous evil.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
The bankruptcy of the German government did, but reparations (which were never actually paid in substantial amounts) had little to do with that. The killer for the German economy was the huge amount of money they had borrowed to pay for the war, which they had intended to repay with money plundered from the countries they conquered. Because they lost, they had to pay for it themselves, and they did not like it. I suppose you could argue the occupation of the Ruhr and hyperinflation were linked to reparations, but that didn’t lead to the rise of Nazism.
If you want to see what a really harsh treaty looks like, check out Brest Litovsk.
It was John Maynard Keynes who called Versailles a 'Carthaginian peace'. It gave Hitler enormous leverage.
There's the famous cartoon right? with the '1939 cannon fodder boy' and Clemenceau saying 'curious, I can hear a child crying'
There are many famous cartoons and sayings. Keynes in fact was principally opposed to reparations for the reason I have given - that due to the indebtedness of Germany there was no realistic prospect of them paying.
My favourite cartoon is of a Junker officer holding a copy of Versailles, apoplectic with fury and shouting ‘why, it’s fully a quarter of what we’d have made them pay if we’d won.’
The French military occupation of the Ruhr after the fact had a much greater humiliation factor than the Versailles treaty itself.
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Reparations from WWI played a big part in creating Nazism. They are an incredibly dangerous evil.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
The bankruptcy of the German government did, but reparations (which were never actually paid in substantial amounts) had little to do with that. The killer for the German economy was the huge amount of money they had borrowed to pay for the war, which they had intended to repay with money plundered from the countries they conquered. Because they lost, they had to pay for it themselves, and they did not like it. I suppose you could argue the occupation of the Ruhr and hyperinflation were linked to reparations, but that didn’t lead to the rise of Nazism.
If you want to see what a really harsh treaty looks like, check out Brest Litovsk.
It was John Maynard Keynes who called Versailles a 'Carthaginian peace'. It gave Hitler enormous leverage.
There's the famous cartoon right? with the '1939 cannon fodder boy' and Clemenceau saying 'curious, I can hear a child crying'
There are many famous cartoons and sayings. Keynes in fact was principally opposed to reparations for the reason I have given - that due to the indebtedness of Germany there was no realistic prospect of them paying.
My favourite cartoon is of a Junker officer holding a copy of Versailles, apoplectic with fury and shouting ‘why, it’s fully a quarter of what we’d have made them pay if we’d won.’
The French military occupation of the Ruhr after the fact had a much greater humiliation factor than the Versailles treaty itself.
I wonder if the reason why Prince Andrew wanted to wear a full Admiral uniform was to one up Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence (i.e. Princess Anne's husband).
Prince Andrew would have been only a Vice Admiral too. If it hadn't been sat on.
The NE had a vote on devolution in Blair's day and a Mr Dom Cummings managed to persuade folk that they didn't want it.
it was going to fail before Mr Cummings got involved - all he did was change the end result from a convincing loss to a "Who thought this was a good idea" result.
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Reparations from WWI played a big part in creating Nazism. They are an incredibly dangerous evil.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
The bankruptcy of the German government did, but reparations (which were never actually paid in substantial amounts) had little to do with that. The killer for the German economy was the huge amount of money they had borrowed to pay for the war, which they had intended to repay with money plundered from the countries they conquered. Because they lost, they had to pay for it themselves, and they did not like it. I suppose you could argue the occupation of the Ruhr and hyperinflation were linked to reparations, but that didn’t lead to the rise of Nazism.
If you want to see what a really harsh treaty looks like, check out Brest Litovsk.
There was also the issue that the German Army told the German people they were winning, right up until they demanded peace and made a civilian government sign it.
They stabbed themselves in the back :-)
And the peace they promised was a no-score draw, not the loss of the war. So it was considered triply unfair in Germany.
To a certain extent the hyper-inflation was due to trying to inflate away the debt....
Again, partly true, and the Dolschtoss myth led to the rise of the Freikorps which caused many problems, to put it mildly, int he early days of Weimar and were the early proving ground for the SA’s most thuggish members.
But if that had been all, Weimar would never have started. There were other problems - for example, the weak and ineffectual democratic systems in place that undermined themselves, and allowed one person to rule by decree under Article 48. Or the corruption of the judiciary. Or the fact that hardly any faction actually supported a democratic system.
Hyperinflation also was partly to help inflate away the debt and boost exports, but it wouldn’t have gone mad in quite the way it did but for the invasion of the Ruhr and the decision of the German government to print money to pay for a general strike.
Weimar was undermined from the start as the "traitor civilians who lost the war".
The reactionary types thought they were getting what they'd always wanted - Kaiserism 2.0 (minus an actual Kaiser), right up until after they "hired" the corporal.
Really not surprising. Ironically in France it’s older people who tend to be more Pro EU and less forgiving of Le Pens past and just as we’ve seen in the UK older people turn out at elections in their droves . Le Pens polling is likely to be inflated now because of Covid and more in-depth polling shows why she has very little chance of becoming President .
Thank you very much @AnneJGP and everyone else who have posted congratulations since my last acknowledgment.
I'm very much looking forward to getting stuck in.
Getting going - a start - can be the hardest thing too. My son had a difficult time post grad finding anything with prospects. Did eventually but it was a worrying period. Longer it goes on, harder it gets. So, yes, nice one. All a piece of cake from here.
Why would you give such crap advice? Although I appreciate you must have been affected with your son but leave that baggage at home. So to speak.
@Gallowgate - when you are starting out in a new career your every move must be made on the assumption that 20 people are after your job and have interviewed for it that morning.
Nope. Getting "in" can be the biggest hurdle of all. Perfectly serious and sincere comment. Phrasing of the last bit was obviously (I'd hope) light hearted.
Stop trying to be "wise" and bossy. You not in the army now.
It's difficult not to appear wise when discussing stuff with you.
I'll try though, promise.
- Wise is actually fine. But not bossy. Try not to be so bossy.
Bet you were a full Colonel, weren't you?
Excellent. A bet. We are on PB after all. How much?
Yikes, even higher?
Maybe best if I don't know then. It'll get in the way.
"Bet you were a full Colonel, weren't you?"
How much?
I sense you're dying to tell me now! But you've missed the moment. Will the chance come again? It might.
"Bet you were a full Colonel, weren't you?"
We happen to be on a betting site. How much?
You're being a little odd now. How much what for what?
How much?
If you have decided against that's fine just say so.
You seem to have gone all weird, Colonel Topping. I'm getting a bit scared now.
So I take it you are backing out of your proposed bet. No shame in that. We'll leave it there.
We can but we don't have to.
If instead of just repeatedly barking "how much?" you were to frame the bet (around your army rank) you're thinking off, we can do it for a modest sum if we both like the look of it.
It needs to come from you because it's about your personal info and I don't want to be striking the wrong note. I like the old banter but I also like to be sensitive to people.
£1,000 that I wasn't a full colonel.
If I was I pay you £1,000; if I wasn't you pay me £1,000.
Hang on, you already know the answer! That sounds like I very likely end up a grand in the hole.
We can do something fairer and more interesting and for less money. A spread bet.
FM Gen Lt Gen Maj Gen Brig Colonel Lt Col Maj Capt Lt 2Lt OCdt
I "buy" you at Colonel for £1 a rank.
Profit or loss to site funds.
Yes?
LOL it was you who offered the bet in the first place. You presumably realised I knew my own rank at the time.
And wait a minute - you think I was an officer?!!?
Just kidding - my evident lack of common sense gives me away as one. Or an ex-one.
But £1 a rank sounds a bit miserly for a noted denizen of NW3. Make it £5 and write out a cheque to Mike for £15 (= most dashing rank) and I'll be happy to match it.
Right you are, CAPTAIN. See, I'm on the ball.
And mental note never to use the word "bet" colloquially when talking to you.
I picture Warren Beatty calling up Carly Simon soon as he heard the song and going, "How much?"
6.5/10 for recovery. Room for improvement.
But you're right: It's ridiculous to take the word bet literally on a site...whose...only ...... stated......... purpose............ is............. to...
... idle away one's late middle age until a better alternative occurs to one.
- Exactly. Nobody believing that self deprecating "Captain" shtick.
Nobody in my family has ever risen to officer rank in the army. Sergeants aplenty, and perhaps towards RSM in one case.
Amazingly, so far as I know, we have no Naval history at all.
There are some elements that sailed as passengers to the colonies though. As here though they've made no great splash.
It's a happy day then when I can chat to the Brigadier as though we're almost equals.
(PS. Topping - I am pulling your leg, and I can't promise not to continue either.)
No army connection at all in mine as far back as I know. One g'dad was too young for WW1 and too old for WW2. The other one was called up for WW1 but got off on account of 'flat feet', meaning couldn't march. The Somme was where he would have headed off to, and of his mates who were lucky enough to have well formed arches most died there.
My Grandfather was in WW1 and did a bit of a grand tour - off to Egypt (as an artilleryman), battled up to Jerusalem. Then he shipped off to Northern Italy (a rather forgotten arena)
I think broadly I'm a little cowardly - so wouldn't have been suited to the life. I do know though that when I'm angry I'm some sort of medieval monster, unfortunately armed with nancy solcialite type armoury. I guess that's why my biological line has survived.
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Reparations from WWI played a big part in creating Nazism. They are an incredibly dangerous evil.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
The bankruptcy of the German government did, but reparations (which were never actually paid in substantial amounts) had little to do with that. The killer for the German economy was the huge amount of money they had borrowed to pay for the war, which they had intended to repay with money plundered from the countries they conquered. Because they lost, they had to pay for it themselves, and they did not like it. I suppose you could argue the occupation of the Ruhr and hyperinflation were linked to reparations, but that didn’t lead to the rise of Nazism.
If you want to see what a really harsh treaty looks like, check out Brest Litovsk.
What Germany achieved by negotiation from a position of strength - essentially control over most of Eastern Europe - became the blueprint for what they aimed for (with added evil) second time around.
I wonder if the reason why Prince Andrew wanted to wear a full Admiral uniform was to one up Vice Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence (i.e. Princess Anne's husband).
Prince Andrew would have been only a Vice Admiral too. If it hadn't been sat on.
Vice Admiral would have been an apt rank for rank & randy Andy.
Halfway through France's planned four-week lockdown, the situation looks the same as it did when then went into it, but with more people in hospital:
38,045 news cases 296 deaths in hospital 5,924 in intensive care
Looking at how relatively constant and not minimising things have been in France for months I think they may have an underbelly of peeps who are ignoring everything.
Compared to the risk of a clot after a vaccine, you are six times more likely to be struck by lightning in your lifetime, 11 times more likely to die in a car accident each year ans 100 times more likely to get a blood clot if you use an oral contraceptive. If you are hospitalised with Covid, your risk of a clot is one in four...Some may decide to wait for more safety data to emerge or in the hope herd immunity will protect them without a vaccine. This strategy is much riskier than having the vaccine...Some people get unpleasant temporary side effects from vaccines. But the overall chance of dying, as with just about every modern vaccine, is around one in a million. Paracetamol is much more of a risk.
Really not surprising. Ironically in France it’s older people who tend to be more Pro EU and less forgiving of Le Pens past and just as we’ve seen in the UK older people turn out at elections in their droves . Le Pens polling is likely to be inflated now because of Covid and more in-depth polling shows why she has very little chance of becoming President .
18 to 24s though are 30% Macron, 25% Le Pen.
Over 65s 33% Macron, 28% Bertrand and just 14% Le Pen.
Macron does best with the youngest and oldest voters, Le Pen does best with the middle aged.
If it was just pensioners it would be a Macron v Les Republicains candidate runoff and Le Pen would be eliminated in round 1
Compared to the risk of a clot after a vaccine, you are six times more likely to be struck by lightning in your lifetime, 11 times more likely to die in a car accident each year ans 100 times more likely to get a blood clot if you use an oral contraceptive. If you are hospitalised with Covid, your risk of a clot is one in four...Some may decide to wait for more safety data to emerge or in the hope herd immunity will protect them without a vaccine. This strategy is much riskier than having the vaccine...Some people get unpleasant temporary side effects from vaccines. But the overall chance of dying, as with just about every modern vaccine, is around one in a million. Paracetamol is much more of a risk.
Pity that is not the default response for all the media
Compared to the risk of a clot after a vaccine, you are six times more likely to be struck by lightning in your lifetime, 11 times more likely to die in a car accident each year ans 100 times more likely to get a blood clot if you use an oral contraceptive. If you are hospitalised with Covid, your risk of a clot is one in four...Some may decide to wait for more safety data to emerge or in the hope herd immunity will protect them without a vaccine. This strategy is much riskier than having the vaccine...Some people get unpleasant temporary side effects from vaccines. But the overall chance of dying, as with just about every modern vaccine, is around one in a million. Paracetamol is much more of a risk.
One in a million is the average risk. There’s a debate about whether, for younger female people with whatever other causal factors are as yet unidentified, the actual is very significantly higher?
Time for my occasional glance at European polling and starting in Spain with the Madrid Regional Election on May 4th and it looks as though the PP are in for a big victory.
Latest poll has PP on 41% (+19) and PSOE on 25% (-2) so that's a hefty 10.5% swing to PP. What's caused this - well, I think we can blame the collapse in Citizens who are down from 19% to 3%. Elsewhere, Greens down three and both VOX and UP up a point and a half.
Madrid is traditionally a centre-right stronghold so a PP win wouldn't be a huge surprise but it'll be interesting to see how much this raises the national profile of the PP leader Isabel Diaz Ayuso as a future high-ranking Cabinet member in a PP Government.
Events in the Netherlands continue to intrigue and it may be, just a couple of weeks after Rutte seemingly won a big victory in the Parliamentary elections, he may well be on his way out.
Looking at French polling, bad though it may well be for Macron whether Bertrand stands or not, the fact remains if he makes it to the final two, he still beats Le Pen comfortably.
Economist: In Britain and Europe we look at how the bonds that hold the United Kingdom together are fraying.
The union is now weaker than at any point in living memory. The causes are many, but Brexit is the most important. Political leaders in London, Edinburgh and Belfast have put their country at risk by the way they have managed Britain’s departure from the European Union.
Boris Johnson, the prime minister, has done it carelessly, by putting party above country and espousing a hard Brexit. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, has done it determinedly, by exploiting Scots’ dislike of the Brexit settlement. Arlene Foster, first minister of Northern Ireland and head of the Democratic Unionist Party has done it stupidly, by rejecting the softer Brexit proposed by Theresa May, Mr Johnson's predecessor.
If the Scots, Northern Irish or even the Welsh choose to go their own way, they should be allowed to do so—but only once it is clearly their settled will. That is by no means the case yet, and this newspaper hopes it never will be.
Compared to the risk of a clot after a vaccine, you are six times more likely to be struck by lightning in your lifetime, 11 times more likely to die in a car accident each year ans 100 times more likely to get a blood clot if you use an oral contraceptive. If you are hospitalised with Covid, your risk of a clot is one in four...Some may decide to wait for more safety data to emerge or in the hope herd immunity will protect them without a vaccine. This strategy is much riskier than having the vaccine...Some people get unpleasant temporary side effects from vaccines. But the overall chance of dying, as with just about every modern vaccine, is around one in a million. Paracetamol is much more of a risk.
One in a million is the average risk. There’s a debate about whether, for younger female people with whatever other causal factors are as yet unidentified, the actual is very significantly higher?
It is hardly likely on the figures we have now to be riskier than taking the pill, and how many young women are taking that?
Over 65s 33% Macron, 28% Bertrand and just 14% Le Pen.
Macron does best with the youngest and oldest voters, Le Pen does best with the middle aged.
If it was just pensioners it would be a Macron v Les Republicains candidate runoff and Le Pen would be eliminated in round 1
That assumes the centre-right pick Bertrand rather than Pecresse but the fact remains it's still a Le Pen-Macron race in Round two and Macron has a comfortable lead (56-43 in the latest poll).
Over 65s 33% Macron, 28% Bertrand and just 14% Le Pen.
Macron does best with the youngest and oldest voters, Le Pen does best with the middle aged.
If it was just pensioners it would be a Macron v Les Republicains candidate runoff and Le Pen would be eliminated in round 1
That assumes the centre-right pick Bertrand rather than Pecresse but the fact remains it's still a Le Pen-Macron race in Round two and Macron has a comfortable lead (56-43 in the latest poll).
Yes, Le Pen may narrowly win round 1 over Macron at the moment but Macron would still win the run off against her.
If however Bertrand was the centre-right candidate and he was in the top 2 in round 1 he could well beat either Macron or Le Pen in the run off
Thank you very much @AnneJGP and everyone else who have posted congratulations since my last acknowledgment.
I'm very much looking forward to getting stuck in.
Getting going - a start - can be the hardest thing too. My son had a difficult time post grad finding anything with prospects. Did eventually but it was a worrying period. Longer it goes on, harder it gets. So, yes, nice one. All a piece of cake from here.
Why would you give such crap advice? Although I appreciate you must have been affected with your son but leave that baggage at home. So to speak.
@Gallowgate - when you are starting out in a new career your every move must be made on the assumption that 20 people are after your job and have interviewed for it that morning.
Nope. Getting "in" can be the biggest hurdle of all. Perfectly serious and sincere comment. Phrasing of the last bit was obviously (I'd hope) light hearted.
Stop trying to be "wise" and bossy. You not in the army now.
It's difficult not to appear wise when discussing stuff with you.
I'll try though, promise.
- Wise is actually fine. But not bossy. Try not to be so bossy.
Bet you were a full Colonel, weren't you?
Excellent. A bet. We are on PB after all. How much?
Yikes, even higher?
Maybe best if I don't know then. It'll get in the way.
"Bet you were a full Colonel, weren't you?"
How much?
I sense you're dying to tell me now! But you've missed the moment. Will the chance come again? It might.
"Bet you were a full Colonel, weren't you?"
We happen to be on a betting site. How much?
You're being a little odd now. How much what for what?
How much?
If you have decided against that's fine just say so.
You seem to have gone all weird, Colonel Topping. I'm getting a bit scared now.
So I take it you are backing out of your proposed bet. No shame in that. We'll leave it there.
We can but we don't have to.
If instead of just repeatedly barking "how much?" you were to frame the bet (around your army rank) you're thinking off, we can do it for a modest sum if we both like the look of it.
It needs to come from you because it's about your personal info and I don't want to be striking the wrong note. I like the old banter but I also like to be sensitive to people.
£1,000 that I wasn't a full colonel.
If I was I pay you £1,000; if I wasn't you pay me £1,000.
Hang on, you already know the answer! That sounds like I very likely end up a grand in the hole.
We can do something fairer and more interesting and for less money. A spread bet.
FM Gen Lt Gen Maj Gen Brig Colonel Lt Col Maj Capt Lt 2Lt OCdt
I "buy" you at Colonel for £1 a rank.
Profit or loss to site funds.
Yes?
LOL it was you who offered the bet in the first place. You presumably realised I knew my own rank at the time.
And wait a minute - you think I was an officer?!!?
Just kidding - my evident lack of common sense gives me away as one. Or an ex-one.
But £1 a rank sounds a bit miserly for a noted denizen of NW3. Make it £5 and write out a cheque to Mike for £15 (= most dashing rank) and I'll be happy to match it.
Right you are, CAPTAIN. See, I'm on the ball.
And mental note never to use the word "bet" colloquially when talking to you.
I picture Warren Beatty calling up Carly Simon soon as he heard the song and going, "How much?"
6.5/10 for recovery. Room for improvement.
But you're right: It's ridiculous to take the word bet literally on a site...whose...only ...... stated......... purpose............ is............. to...
... idle away one's late middle age until a better alternative occurs to one.
Economist: In Britain and Europe we look at how the bonds that hold the United Kingdom together are fraying.
The union is now weaker than at any point in living memory. The causes are many, but Brexit is the most important. Political leaders in London, Edinburgh and Belfast have put their country at risk by the way they have managed Britain’s departure from the European Union.
Boris Johnson, the prime minister, has done it carelessly, by putting party above country and espousing a hard Brexit. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, has done it determinedly, by exploiting Scots’ dislike of the Brexit settlement. Arlene Foster, first minister of Northern Ireland and head of the Democratic Unionist Party has done it stupidly, by rejecting the softer Brexit proposed by Theresa May, Mr Johnson's predecessor.
If the Scots, Northern Irish or even the Welsh choose to go their own way, they should be allowed to do so—but only once it is clearly their settled will. That is by no means the case yet, and this newspaper hopes it never will be.
An interesting take, as always, by the Economist. But if this influential weekly had understood the dynamics of ordinary people 20 or 30 years before it did it might have done a lot of good. Its intellectual disdain for popular politics is a problem not a solution. It (almost) never got to grips with the democratic deficit or the meaning of ever closer union.
They fail to answer a key question: What is this other sort of Brexit (the unhard one) that would have actually got through the commons? Mrs May would like to know too; she tried. SFAICS Boris got through the nearest thing to the only runner. What should he have done?
And Brexit is not the main driver of disunion either for NI or Scotland. The NI problems go back not to 2016 but more like 1171 and thereafter; and the Scotland issue goes back to the devolution debacle where we end up with Scotland having an alternative government while, say, Yorkshire, with the same population as Scotland looks after local issues. It was a pure danegeld offer, accepted with both hands.
The divisive referendum was pre Brexit. Brexit is not the real issue.
Our home is 90% Sandtex external brilliant white paint
Including the roof?
Fair comment.
The walls are 90% white paint and half the roof has solar panels
Do you live in a house, or a Stevenson Screen?
It is consistent with being a seaside home
I was being a smart-arse BigG.
My coastal house is painted a marine blue colour. I was tempted on that colour interspersed with vertical white stripes, but that might look too camp. The blue works.
Our home is 90% Sandtex external brilliant white paint
Including the roof?
Fair comment.
The walls are 90% white paint and half the roof has solar panels
Do you live in a house, or a Stevenson Screen?
It is consistent with being a seaside home
I was being a smart- arse BigG.
My coastal house is painted a marine blue colour. I was tempted on that colour interspersed with vertical white stripes, but that might look too camp. The blue works.
Not at all and there are some marine blue homes, indeed one nearby with beach access and recently built for over a million. Silly money
Our home is 90% Sandtex external brilliant white paint
Including the roof?
Fair comment.
The walls are 90% white paint and half the roof has solar panels
Do you live in a house, or a Stevenson Screen?
It is consistent with being a seaside home
I was being a smart- arse BigG.
My coastal house is painted a marine blue colour. I was tempted on that colour interspersed with vertical white stripes, but that might look too camp. The blue works.
Not at all and there are some marine blue homes, indeed one nearby with beach access and recently built for over a million. Silly money
Exercising less would help too. Less breathing going on. I suppose painting the Sahara will be OK, but work will be needed on the tundra, the coniferous forests and most of all painting the sea will be a challenge.
The hard copies of The Guardian would be more environmental if they were pure white instead of having the great thoughts of Polly Toynbee and other equally unreadable clickbait printed on them in heat retaining black.
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Reparations from WWI played a big part in creating Nazism. They are an incredibly dangerous evil.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
I think any former American slave should be paid reparations. As they would be coming up to 160 though, it might be a bit late. I can make a far better case for reparations for Native Americans. Or for Vietnam.
Our home is 90% Sandtex external brilliant white paint
Including the roof?
Fair comment.
The walls are 90% white paint and half the roof has solar panels
Do you live in a house, or a Stevenson Screen?
It is consistent with being a seaside home
I was being a smart-arse BigG.
My coastal house is painted a marine blue colour. I was tempted on that colour interspersed with vertical white stripes, but that might look too camp. The blue works.
I considered blue for my coastal house, when I moved in, but settled for sticking with white. When I met the neighbours they said they were very pleased; the occupant before last had apparently painted the house a lurid purple colour, and it looked hideous and was known throughout the town. When I was decorating I found bits of the old paint and it was dark full on purple. Must have been awful.
Historically if you take the 4 general elections since WW2 after one party had been in power for 10 years or more, as will be the case in 2024, the odds favour a change in government.
That was the case in 1964, 1997 and 2010, the only exception being in 1992 where Major's Tories held on despite some losses to Kinnock's Labour.
The question then is whether Starmer is Wilson 1964 or Cameron 2010 and becomes PM or Kinnock 1992 and he narrowly fails to, unless this government performs disastrously he is unlikely to be Blair 1997, more likely he will win narrowly as Wilson did in 1964 or more likely still become PM after a hung parliament as Cameron did in 2010
The other question is whether the change of governing party has already occurred. Does the voting public regard HMG as a Conservative government since 2010 or has the change from Cameron to May to Boris satisfied any putative demand for change?
It might be that in co-opting the popular parts of Jeremy Corbyn's platform and running against Cameron and May-style Conservatism, Boris already is the change prime minister. I'd not be wagering on 2024 based on historical parallels.
ETA I now see @moonshine has made much the same point in the last few minutes.
Boris is certainly much less of a fiscally conservative PM than Cameron was and is arguably now governing even as a social democrat, he has also delivered Brexit obviously which Cameron opposed and a harder Brexit than May wanted too.
So yes there is something in your point that a change of government has occurred already to some extent
If one really wants to be mischievous, what about Johnson as Major redux? Not (so far) the exhausted Major of 1997, but the triumphant Major of May 1992.
Both took over as PM after the Conservatives had been office for a long time and were struggling.
Both ditched the baggage holding the party down (Poll Tax, Brexit faff).
Both were seen as reaching out in a way that other Tories couldn't. If you weren't around at the time, you might not believe it, but the soapbox thing worked.
Both pulled off remarkable victories against an opposition that wasn't really ready for office. Remember, Major's 14.1 million votes still hasn't been beaten.
Both were, in different ways, masters of the art of persuading people that they were on their side.
There are differences of course. Johnson has been much more ruthless at getting rid of potential bastards before they can cause him trouble.
But in 1992, people were saying the same things that they're saying now; that Britain will become like Japan with a single natural party of government. Ten more glorious Conservative years.
But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder.
For those of us that have followed politics for a long time (and indeed have had an interest in history) your last para is quite powerful:
"But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder."
As you say, people forget the John Major of 1992, and for that matter the John Major of Gulf war 1. Johnson apologists should take note.
By the way, I once met Major, and to my surprise he was genuinely charismatic, and came across as a genuinely nice chap. It was also, mercifully before the news regarding Edwina came out!
Yes, Major was a much underrated PM. He is also the only party leader since universal suffrage in 1918 to win a general election after more than 10 consecutive years of his party in power.
Boris or Sunak would need to match that to be re elected in 2024
Major is a great bloke and all that but catastrophic with regard to: ERM, where we should never have entertained the idea of going in. The ERM was the forerunner of the Euro. If it had never started we would still be in the EU. If we had joined it the outlook is unthinkable.
And Maastricht. From today's perspective the idea of a Treaty in which every person in the EU becomes an EU citizen is big and bold. It ought to have been vetoed immediately to signal what the UKs long term goals were. But if acceptable to a government (and of course real as opposed to tactical opposition only came from the Tory right and a handful of Labour traditionalists) a referendum should have been the minimum qualification.
It has taken decades to sort both nation and Tory party from this sorry mess.
That's all true. But I don't think the ERM and Maastricht are as much Major's fault - they were messes dropped on his lap by Lawson and Howe respectively, and the other pro-European Big Beasts of the Conservative Party. Given where the Party and the country were around 1989-90, it would not have been realistic to expect him to be even a Hague-style eurosceptic, let alone a Faragiste. Major's opponents in the leadership election were Heseltine and Hurd, after all, both even more europhile than he was.
But his clinging to the shattered corpse of our EU membership today, when even Lawson has given that up, is less explicable..
Like Johnson, Major was good at leaving the various factions thinking he sympathised with them, but whereas Johnson achieves this by telling everyone what they want to hear, Major did so by remaining cagey. Appearing to be the least pro-EU of the serious contenders cleverly got him the top job, but he went on to disappoint the sceptics, and his comments during and after the referendum suggest that he has been skilled at keeping his own views hidden when it suited.
I think that's undoubtedly true. Major wasn't quite the ideology vacuum that say Johnson or Blair are. But he had a great poker face. And it's also certainly true that the Conservative Party was much more europhilic in 1990 than it was in 2016, let alone today.
Back when he was a junior minister, a good friend of mine was a civil servant working as part of his team. This friend was always going on about how brilliant Major was, and we had great fun taking the piss out of his genius-complex since Major had next to no public profile and evidenced little brilliance at the time. When he made the top job my friend did get the last laugh. At least for a while.
It is a huge bonus for a politician to be underestimated. Mrs Thatcher, John Major, Theresa May and Boris Johnson have all reaped huge dividends in this way.
The first three undoubtedly had to brave out the critics. I think actually doing so was helpful only for Maggie - she probably was underestimated a number of times, a serial underestimatee. Major simply became a bunker mentality. May gave herself a little time, but actually finished up not seeing that she wasn't PM material.
I don't really think that people have underestimated Boris.
A lot depends upon how Boris’s story ends. PMs’ stories usually end badly, and in his case the potential for it to end very badly indeed remains considerable.
Has any story ended worse than David Cameron's? Possibly not since Eden.
Mrs May's exit was very humiliating.
Everything about May was humiliating.
Momentarily she achieved astonishing poll numbers.
Her campaign against Corbyn has to be the worst by a conservative leader since Major in 1997. Actually, it was probably worse.
Much worse than Major. Major was already fecked by his own MP's before the Election was called. Mrs May has everything going for until she decided on her madness of screwing the very people whose support she needed. Madness on an epic scale.
Exercising less would help too. Less breathing going on. I suppose painting the Sahara will be OK, but work will be needed on the tundra, the coniferous forests and most of all painting the sea will be a challenge.
The hard copies of The Guardian would be more environmental if they were pure white instead of having the great thoughts of Polly Toynbee and other equally unreadable clickbait printed on them in heat retaining black.
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Reparations from WWI played a big part in creating Nazism. They are an incredibly dangerous evil.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
I think any former American slave should be paid reparations. As they would be coming up to 160 though, it might be a bit late. I can make a far better case for reparations for Native Americans. Or for Vietnam.
A key tenet of Christian morality is that the sins of the father are not vested on the children ("The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father").
That holds here.
Reparations are just a quick way to civil war, and it staggers me that some people seem so blind to this.
Historically if you take the 4 general elections since WW2 after one party had been in power for 10 years or more, as will be the case in 2024, the odds favour a change in government.
That was the case in 1964, 1997 and 2010, the only exception being in 1992 where Major's Tories held on despite some losses to Kinnock's Labour.
The question then is whether Starmer is Wilson 1964 or Cameron 2010 and becomes PM or Kinnock 1992 and he narrowly fails to, unless this government performs disastrously he is unlikely to be Blair 1997, more likely he will win narrowly as Wilson did in 1964 or more likely still become PM after a hung parliament as Cameron did in 2010
The other question is whether the change of governing party has already occurred. Does the voting public regard HMG as a Conservative government since 2010 or has the change from Cameron to May to Boris satisfied any putative demand for change?
It might be that in co-opting the popular parts of Jeremy Corbyn's platform and running against Cameron and May-style Conservatism, Boris already is the change prime minister. I'd not be wagering on 2024 based on historical parallels.
ETA I now see @moonshine has made much the same point in the last few minutes.
Boris is certainly much less of a fiscally conservative PM than Cameron was and is arguably now governing even as a social democrat, he has also delivered Brexit obviously which Cameron opposed and a harder Brexit than May wanted too.
So yes there is something in your point that a change of government has occurred already to some extent
If one really wants to be mischievous, what about Johnson as Major redux? Not (so far) the exhausted Major of 1997, but the triumphant Major of May 1992.
Both took over as PM after the Conservatives had been office for a long time and were struggling.
Both ditched the baggage holding the party down (Poll Tax, Brexit faff).
Both were seen as reaching out in a way that other Tories couldn't. If you weren't around at the time, you might not believe it, but the soapbox thing worked.
Both pulled off remarkable victories against an opposition that wasn't really ready for office. Remember, Major's 14.1 million votes still hasn't been beaten.
Both were, in different ways, masters of the art of persuading people that they were on their side.
There are differences of course. Johnson has been much more ruthless at getting rid of potential bastards before they can cause him trouble.
But in 1992, people were saying the same things that they're saying now; that Britain will become like Japan with a single natural party of government. Ten more glorious Conservative years.
But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder.
For those of us that have followed politics for a long time (and indeed have had an interest in history) your last para is quite powerful:
"But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder."
As you say, people forget the John Major of 1992, and for that matter the John Major of Gulf war 1. Johnson apologists should take note.
By the way, I once met Major, and to my surprise he was genuinely charismatic, and came across as a genuinely nice chap. It was also, mercifully before the news regarding Edwina came out!
Yes, Major was a much underrated PM. He is also the only party leader since universal suffrage in 1918 to win a general election after more than 10 consecutive years of his party in power.
Boris or Sunak would need to match that to be re elected in 2024
Major is a great bloke and all that but catastrophic with regard to: ERM, where we should never have entertained the idea of going in. The ERM was the forerunner of the Euro. If it had never started we would still be in the EU. If we had joined it the outlook is unthinkable.
And Maastricht. From today's perspective the idea of a Treaty in which every person in the EU becomes an EU citizen is big and bold. It ought to have been vetoed immediately to signal what the UKs long term goals were. But if acceptable to a government (and of course real as opposed to tactical opposition only came from the Tory right and a handful of Labour traditionalists) a referendum should have been the minimum qualification.
It has taken decades to sort both nation and Tory party from this sorry mess.
That's all true. But I don't think the ERM and Maastricht are as much Major's fault - they were messes dropped on his lap by Lawson and Howe respectively, and the other pro-European Big Beasts of the Conservative Party. Given where the Party and the country were around 1989-90, it would not have been realistic to expect him to be even a Hague-style eurosceptic, let alone a Faragiste. Major's opponents in the leadership election were Heseltine and Hurd, after all, both even more europhile than he was.
But his clinging to the shattered corpse of our EU membership today, when even Lawson has given that up, is less explicable..
Like Johnson, Major was good at leaving the various factions thinking he sympathised with them, but whereas Johnson achieves this by telling everyone what they want to hear, Major did so by remaining cagey. Appearing to be the least pro-EU of the serious contenders cleverly got him the top job, but he went on to disappoint the sceptics, and his comments during and after the referendum suggest that he has been skilled at keeping his own views hidden when it suited.
I think that's undoubtedly true. Major wasn't quite the ideology vacuum that say Johnson or Blair are. But he had a great poker face. And it's also certainly true that the Conservative Party was much more europhilic in 1990 than it was in 2016, let alone today.
Back when he was a junior minister, a good friend of mine was a civil servant working as part of his team. This friend was always going on about how brilliant Major was, and we had great fun taking the piss out of his genius-complex since Major had next to no public profile and evidenced little brilliance at the time. When he made the top job my friend did get the last laugh. At least for a while.
It is a huge bonus for a politician to be underestimated. Mrs Thatcher, John Major, Theresa May and Boris Johnson have all reaped huge dividends in this way.
The first three undoubtedly had to brave out the critics. I think actually doing so was helpful only for Maggie - she probably was underestimated a number of times, a serial underestimatee. Major simply became a bunker mentality. May gave herself a little time, but actually finished up not seeing that she wasn't PM material.
I don't really think that people have underestimated Boris.
A lot depends upon how Boris’s story ends. PMs’ stories usually end badly, and in his case the potential for it to end very badly indeed remains considerable.
Has any story ended worse than David Cameron's? Possibly not since Eden.
Mrs May's exit was very humiliating.
Everything about May was humiliating.
Momentarily she achieved astonishing poll numbers.
Her campaign against Corbyn has to be the worst by a conservative leader since Major in 1997. Actually, it was probably worse.
Much worse than Major. Major was already fecked by his own MP's before the Election was called. Mrs May has everything going for until she decided on her madness of screwing the very people whose support she needed. Madness on an epic scale.
It was more than that, though. It was the robotic strong and stable, the reluctance to actually campaign, the lack of anything positive, the hubristic assumption of a big majority incoming, all of which put fear into people of what she’d be like if she actually got one. Meanwhile her chancellor was locked in a cupboard and they couldn’t attack Labour’s spending plans because their own didn’t stack up and had a huge Brexit shaped hole in them. Meanwhile the Tories overstating the case against Corbyn came back to bite them when he turned out to have some worthwhile things to say after all.
Halfway through France's planned four-week lockdown, the situation looks the same as it did when then went into it, but with more people in hospital:
38,045 news cases 296 deaths in hospital 5,924 in intensive care
With all due respect, duh.
Case numbers are always a rear view mirror looking... about two weeks behind.
But deaths have been essentially flat for about 6 weeks, though cases started rising about 4 weeks ago. And if you give the 7-day average a flex of around 100, it's really been flat for about 4.5 months.
Even if there is the delayed effect coming through in the next couple of weeks, it's still a pretty unusual pattern as far as the other Western European nations with poor outcomes go.
Historically if you take the 4 general elections since WW2 after one party had been in power for 10 years or more, as will be the case in 2024, the odds favour a change in government.
That was the case in 1964, 1997 and 2010, the only exception being in 1992 where Major's Tories held on despite some losses to Kinnock's Labour.
The question then is whether Starmer is Wilson 1964 or Cameron 2010 and becomes PM or Kinnock 1992 and he narrowly fails to, unless this government performs disastrously he is unlikely to be Blair 1997, more likely he will win narrowly as Wilson did in 1964 or more likely still become PM after a hung parliament as Cameron did in 2010
The other question is whether the change of governing party has already occurred. Does the voting public regard HMG as a Conservative government since 2010 or has the change from Cameron to May to Boris satisfied any putative demand for change?
It might be that in co-opting the popular parts of Jeremy Corbyn's platform and running against Cameron and May-style Conservatism, Boris already is the change prime minister. I'd not be wagering on 2024 based on historical parallels.
ETA I now see @moonshine has made much the same point in the last few minutes.
Boris is certainly much less of a fiscally conservative PM than Cameron was and is arguably now governing even as a social democrat, he has also delivered Brexit obviously which Cameron opposed and a harder Brexit than May wanted too.
So yes there is something in your point that a change of government has occurred already to some extent
If one really wants to be mischievous, what about Johnson as Major redux? Not (so far) the exhausted Major of 1997, but the triumphant Major of May 1992.
Both took over as PM after the Conservatives had been office for a long time and were struggling.
Both ditched the baggage holding the party down (Poll Tax, Brexit faff).
Both were seen as reaching out in a way that other Tories couldn't. If you weren't around at the time, you might not believe it, but the soapbox thing worked.
Both pulled off remarkable victories against an opposition that wasn't really ready for office. Remember, Major's 14.1 million votes still hasn't been beaten.
Both were, in different ways, masters of the art of persuading people that they were on their side.
There are differences of course. Johnson has been much more ruthless at getting rid of potential bastards before they can cause him trouble.
But in 1992, people were saying the same things that they're saying now; that Britain will become like Japan with a single natural party of government. Ten more glorious Conservative years.
But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder.
For those of us that have followed politics for a long time (and indeed have had an interest in history) your last para is quite powerful:
"But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder."
As you say, people forget the John Major of 1992, and for that matter the John Major of Gulf war 1. Johnson apologists should take note.
By the way, I once met Major, and to my surprise he was genuinely charismatic, and came across as a genuinely nice chap. It was also, mercifully before the news regarding Edwina came out!
Yes, Major was a much underrated PM. He is also the only party leader since universal suffrage in 1918 to win a general election after more than 10 consecutive years of his party in power.
Boris or Sunak would need to match that to be re elected in 2024
Major is a great bloke and all that but catastrophic with regard to: ERM, where we should never have entertained the idea of going in. The ERM was the forerunner of the Euro. If it had never started we would still be in the EU. If we had joined it the outlook is unthinkable.
And Maastricht. From today's perspective the idea of a Treaty in which every person in the EU becomes an EU citizen is big and bold. It ought to have been vetoed immediately to signal what the UKs long term goals were. But if acceptable to a government (and of course real as opposed to tactical opposition only came from the Tory right and a handful of Labour traditionalists) a referendum should have been the minimum qualification.
It has taken decades to sort both nation and Tory party from this sorry mess.
That's all true. But I don't think the ERM and Maastricht are as much Major's fault - they were messes dropped on his lap by Lawson and Howe respectively, and the other pro-European Big Beasts of the Conservative Party. Given where the Party and the country were around 1989-90, it would not have been realistic to expect him to be even a Hague-style eurosceptic, let alone a Faragiste. Major's opponents in the leadership election were Heseltine and Hurd, after all, both even more europhile than he was.
But his clinging to the shattered corpse of our EU membership today, when even Lawson has given that up, is less explicable..
Like Johnson, Major was good at leaving the various factions thinking he sympathised with them, but whereas Johnson achieves this by telling everyone what they want to hear, Major did so by remaining cagey. Appearing to be the least pro-EU of the serious contenders cleverly got him the top job, but he went on to disappoint the sceptics, and his comments during and after the referendum suggest that he has been skilled at keeping his own views hidden when it suited.
I think that's undoubtedly true. Major wasn't quite the ideology vacuum that say Johnson or Blair are. But he had a great poker face. And it's also certainly true that the Conservative Party was much more europhilic in 1990 than it was in 2016, let alone today.
Back when he was a junior minister, a good friend of mine was a civil servant working as part of his team. This friend was always going on about how brilliant Major was, and we had great fun taking the piss out of his genius-complex since Major had next to no public profile and evidenced little brilliance at the time. When he made the top job my friend did get the last laugh. At least for a while.
It is a huge bonus for a politician to be underestimated. Mrs Thatcher, John Major, Theresa May and Boris Johnson have all reaped huge dividends in this way.
The first three undoubtedly had to brave out the critics. I think actually doing so was helpful only for Maggie - she probably was underestimated a number of times, a serial underestimatee. Major simply became a bunker mentality. May gave herself a little time, but actually finished up not seeing that she wasn't PM material.
I don't really think that people have underestimated Boris.
A lot depends upon how Boris’s story ends. PMs’ stories usually end badly, and in his case the potential for it to end very badly indeed remains considerable.
Has any story ended worse than David Cameron's? Possibly not since Eden.
Mrs May's exit was very humiliating.
Everything about May was humiliating.
Momentarily she achieved astonishing poll numbers.
Her campaign against Corbyn has to be the worst by a conservative leader since Major in 1997. Actually, it was probably worse.
Much worse than Major. Major was already fecked by his own MP's before the Election was called. Mrs May has everything going for until she decided on her madness of screwing the very people whose support she needed. Madness on an epic scale.
It was more than that, though. It was the robotic strong and stable, the reluctance to actually campaign, the lack of anything positive, the hubristic assumption of a big majority incoming, all of which put fear into people of what she’d be like if she actually got one. Meanwhile her chancellor was locked in a cupboard and they couldn’t attack Labour’s spending plans because their own didn’t stack up and had a huge Brexit shaped hole in them. Meanwhile the Tories overstating the case against Corbyn came back to bite them when he turned out to have some worthwhile things to say after all.
Given the simple choice of Major, May or Johnson, I would have Major or May back in a heartbeat.
Economist: In Britain and Europe we look at how the bonds that hold the United Kingdom together are fraying.
The union is now weaker than at any point in living memory. The causes are many, but Brexit is the most important. Political leaders in London, Edinburgh and Belfast have put their country at risk by the way they have managed Britain’s departure from the European Union.
Boris Johnson, the prime minister, has done it carelessly, by putting party above country and espousing a hard Brexit. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, has done it determinedly, by exploiting Scots’ dislike of the Brexit settlement. Arlene Foster, first minister of Northern Ireland and head of the Democratic Unionist Party has done it stupidly, by rejecting the softer Brexit proposed by Theresa May, Mr Johnson's predecessor.
If the Scots, Northern Irish or even the Welsh choose to go their own way, they should be allowed to do so—but only once it is clearly their settled will. That is by no means the case yet, and this newspaper hopes it never will be.
An interesting take, as always, by the Economist. But if this influential weekly had understood the dynamics of ordinary people 20 or 30 years before it did it might have done a lot of good. Its intellectual disdain for popular politics is a problem not a solution. It (almost) never got to grips with the democratic deficit or the meaning of ever closer union.
They fail to answer a key question: What is this other sort of Brexit (the unhard one) that would have actually got through the commons? Mrs May would like to know too; she tried. SFAICS Boris got through the nearest thing to the only runner. What should he have done?
And Brexit is not the main driver of disunion either for NI or Scotland. The NI problems go back not to 2016 but more like 1171 and thereafter; and the Scotland issue goes back to the devolution debacle where we end up with Scotland having an alternative government while, say, Yorkshire, with the same population as Scotland looks after local issues. It was a pure danegeld offer, accepted with both hands.
The divisive referendum was pre Brexit. Brexit is not the real issue.
Well said.
There's a strange kind of affliction that affects many otherwise intelligent people that they simply can not comprehend Brexit. They simply can't comprehend the democratic problems with the European Union, the desire to control our own laws or the potential for an economic upside.
We get people on this site and the Economist here keen to demonstrate their own blind spot by loudly and vocally denigrating the "populist" majority who disagreed with them and see matters differently.
I wonder whether time will help people get over this affliction and people will start to comprehend what others knew, or if certain people are going to go to their graves screaming about "populists" and "lies" and lest we ever forget that bus.
Economist: In Britain and Europe we look at how the bonds that hold the United Kingdom together are fraying.
The union is now weaker than at any point in living memory. The causes are many, but Brexit is the most important. Political leaders in London, Edinburgh and Belfast have put their country at risk by the way they have managed Britain’s departure from the European Union.
Boris Johnson, the prime minister, has done it carelessly, by putting party above country and espousing a hard Brexit. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, has done it determinedly, by exploiting Scots’ dislike of the Brexit settlement. Arlene Foster, first minister of Northern Ireland and head of the Democratic Unionist Party has done it stupidly, by rejecting the softer Brexit proposed by Theresa May, Mr Johnson's predecessor.
If the Scots, Northern Irish or even the Welsh choose to go their own way, they should be allowed to do so—but only once it is clearly their settled will. That is by no means the case yet, and this newspaper hopes it never will be.
It's always bothered me how The Economist refers to itself as a newspaper.
Halfway through France's planned four-week lockdown, the situation looks the same as it did when then went into it, but with more people in hospital:
38,045 news cases 296 deaths in hospital 5,924 in intensive care
With all due respect, duh.
Case numbers are always a rear view mirror looking... about two weeks behind.
But deaths have been essentially flat for about 6 weeks, though cases started rising about 4 weeks ago. And if you give the 7-day average a flex of around 100, it's really been flat for about 4.5 months.
Even if there is the delayed effect coming through in the next couple of weeks, it's still a pretty unusual pattern as far as the other Western European nations with poor outcomes go.
That wasn't the point I was making: the point is that two weeks into a four week lockdown you would expect to see cases not a million miles from the start, because of the lags inherent in the gap between infection and testing positive.
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Reparations from WWI played a big part in creating Nazism. They are an incredibly dangerous evil.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
I think any former American slave should be paid reparations. As they would be coming up to 160 though, it might be a bit late. I can make a far better case for reparations for Native Americans. Or for Vietnam.
A key tenet of Christian morality is that the sins of the father are not vested on the children ("The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father").
Aren't we supposed to be simultaneously grateful for the removal of original sin though? Seems contradictory
(half rembered uncertain doctrine on the internet is the best way of settling theological disputes, I find)
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Reparations from WWI played a big part in creating Nazism. They are an incredibly dangerous evil.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
I think any former American slave should be paid reparations. As they would be coming up to 160 though, it might be a bit late. I can make a far better case for reparations for Native Americans. Or for Vietnam.
A key tenet of Christian morality is that the sins of the father are not vested on the children ("The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father").
That holds here.
Reparations are just a quick way to civil war, and it staggers me that some people seem so blind to this.
Indeed. And that's where the radical wing of Wokeism is leading us.
Historically if you take the 4 general elections since WW2 after one party had been in power for 10 years or more, as will be the case in 2024, the odds favour a change in government.
That was the case in 1964, 1997 and 2010, the only exception being in 1992 where Major's Tories held on despite some losses to Kinnock's Labour.
The question then is whether Starmer is Wilson 1964 or Cameron 2010 and becomes PM or Kinnock 1992 and he narrowly fails to, unless this government performs disastrously he is unlikely to be Blair 1997, more likely he will win narrowly as Wilson did in 1964 or more likely still become PM after a hung parliament as Cameron did in 2010
The other question is whether the change of governing party has already occurred. Does the voting public regard HMG as a Conservative government since 2010 or has the change from Cameron to May to Boris satisfied any putative demand for change?
It might be that in co-opting the popular parts of Jeremy Corbyn's platform and running against Cameron and May-style Conservatism, Boris already is the change prime minister. I'd not be wagering on 2024 based on historical parallels.
ETA I now see @moonshine has made much the same point in the last few minutes.
Boris is certainly much less of a fiscally conservative PM than Cameron was and is arguably now governing even as a social democrat, he has also delivered Brexit obviously which Cameron opposed and a harder Brexit than May wanted too.
So yes there is something in your point that a change of government has occurred already to some extent
If one really wants to be mischievous, what about Johnson as Major redux? Not (so far) the exhausted Major of 1997, but the triumphant Major of May 1992.
Both took over as PM after the Conservatives had been office for a long time and were struggling.
Both ditched the baggage holding the party down (Poll Tax, Brexit faff).
Both were seen as reaching out in a way that other Tories couldn't. If you weren't around at the time, you might not believe it, but the soapbox thing worked.
Both pulled off remarkable victories against an opposition that wasn't really ready for office. Remember, Major's 14.1 million votes still hasn't been beaten.
Both were, in different ways, masters of the art of persuading people that they were on their side.
There are differences of course. Johnson has been much more ruthless at getting rid of potential bastards before they can cause him trouble.
But in 1992, people were saying the same things that they're saying now; that Britain will become like Japan with a single natural party of government. Ten more glorious Conservative years.
But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder.
For those of us that have followed politics for a long time (and indeed have had an interest in history) your last para is quite powerful:
"But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder."
As you say, people forget the John Major of 1992, and for that matter the John Major of Gulf war 1. Johnson apologists should take note.
By the way, I once met Major, and to my surprise he was genuinely charismatic, and came across as a genuinely nice chap. It was also, mercifully before the news regarding Edwina came out!
Yes, Major was a much underrated PM. He is also the only party leader since universal suffrage in 1918 to win a general election after more than 10 consecutive years of his party in power.
Boris or Sunak would need to match that to be re elected in 2024
Major is a great bloke and all that but catastrophic with regard to: ERM, where we should never have entertained the idea of going in. The ERM was the forerunner of the Euro. If it had never started we would still be in the EU. If we had joined it the outlook is unthinkable.
And Maastricht. From today's perspective the idea of a Treaty in which every person in the EU becomes an EU citizen is big and bold. It ought to have been vetoed immediately to signal what the UKs long term goals were. But if acceptable to a government (and of course real as opposed to tactical opposition only came from the Tory right and a handful of Labour traditionalists) a referendum should have been the minimum qualification.
It has taken decades to sort both nation and Tory party from this sorry mess.
That's all true. But I don't think the ERM and Maastricht are as much Major's fault - they were messes dropped on his lap by Lawson and Howe respectively, and the other pro-European Big Beasts of the Conservative Party. Given where the Party and the country were around 1989-90, it would not have been realistic to expect him to be even a Hague-style eurosceptic, let alone a Faragiste. Major's opponents in the leadership election were Heseltine and Hurd, after all, both even more europhile than he was.
But his clinging to the shattered corpse of our EU membership today, when even Lawson has given that up, is less explicable..
Like Johnson, Major was good at leaving the various factions thinking he sympathised with them, but whereas Johnson achieves this by telling everyone what they want to hear, Major did so by remaining cagey. Appearing to be the least pro-EU of the serious contenders cleverly got him the top job, but he went on to disappoint the sceptics, and his comments during and after the referendum suggest that he has been skilled at keeping his own views hidden when it suited.
I think that's undoubtedly true. Major wasn't quite the ideology vacuum that say Johnson or Blair are. But he had a great poker face. And it's also certainly true that the Conservative Party was much more europhilic in 1990 than it was in 2016, let alone today.
Back when he was a junior minister, a good friend of mine was a civil servant working as part of his team. This friend was always going on about how brilliant Major was, and we had great fun taking the piss out of his genius-complex since Major had next to no public profile and evidenced little brilliance at the time. When he made the top job my friend did get the last laugh. At least for a while.
It is a huge bonus for a politician to be underestimated. Mrs Thatcher, John Major, Theresa May and Boris Johnson have all reaped huge dividends in this way.
The first three undoubtedly had to brave out the critics. I think actually doing so was helpful only for Maggie - she probably was underestimated a number of times, a serial underestimatee. Major simply became a bunker mentality. May gave herself a little time, but actually finished up not seeing that she wasn't PM material.
I don't really think that people have underestimated Boris.
A lot depends upon how Boris’s story ends. PMs’ stories usually end badly, and in his case the potential for it to end very badly indeed remains considerable.
Has any story ended worse than David Cameron's? Possibly not since Eden.
Mrs May's exit was very humiliating.
Everything about May was humiliating.
Momentarily she achieved astonishing poll numbers.
Her campaign against Corbyn has to be the worst by a conservative leader since Major in 1997. Actually, it was probably worse.
Much worse than Major. Major was already fecked by his own MP's before the Election was called. Mrs May has everything going for until she decided on her madness of screwing the very people whose support she needed. Madness on an epic scale.
It was more than that, though. It was the robotic strong and stable, the reluctance to actually campaign, the lack of anything positive, the hubristic assumption of a big majority incoming, all of which put fear into people of what she’d be like if she actually got one. Meanwhile her chancellor was locked in a cupboard and they couldn’t attack Labour’s spending plans because their own didn’t stack up and had a huge Brexit shaped hole in them. Meanwhile the Tories overstating the case against Corbyn came back to bite them when he turned out to have some worthwhile things to say after all.
Lets not forget going to the polls because it was so important to let the public have their say and to take on the "saboteurs" - while running a mile from any members of the public or attending any of the debates.
Our home is 90% Sandtex external brilliant white paint
Including the roof?
Fair comment.
The walls are 90% white paint and half the roof has solar panels
Do you live in a house, or a Stevenson Screen?
It is consistent with being a seaside home
I was being a smart-arse BigG.
My coastal house is painted a marine blue colour. I was tempted on that colour interspersed with vertical white stripes, but that might look too camp. The blue works.
I considered blue for my coastal house, when I moved in, but settled for sticking with white. When I met the neighbours they said they were very pleased; the occupant before last had apparently painted the house a lurid purple colour, and it looked hideous and was known throughout the town. When I was decorating I found bits of the old paint and it was dark full on purple. Must have been awful.
Our home is 90% Sandtex external brilliant white paint
Including the roof?
Fair comment.
The walls are 90% white paint and half the roof has solar panels
Do you live in a house, or a Stevenson Screen?
It is consistent with being a seaside home
I was being a smart-arse BigG.
My coastal house is painted a marine blue colour. I was tempted on that colour interspersed with vertical white stripes, but that might look too camp. The blue works.
I considered blue for my coastal house, when I moved in, but settled for sticking with white. When I met the neighbours they said they were very pleased; the occupant before last had apparently painted the house a lurid purple colour, and it looked hideous and was known throughout the town. When I was decorating I found bits of the old paint and it was dark full on purple. Must have been awful.
You need to check your white privilege.
I guess blue bloods don't have white privilege, then?
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
The problem is that they cannot see the damage their philosophy has done to the rest of Europe
Exercising less would help too. Less breathing going on. I suppose painting the Sahara will be OK, but work will be needed on the tundra, the coniferous forests and most of all painting the sea will be a challenge.
The hard copies of The Guardian would be more environmental if they were pure white instead of having the great thoughts of Polly Toynbee and other equally unreadable clickbait printed on them in heat retaining black.
Loving this doctor!
A biostatistician many years ago made a related point in a presentation I attended. Longevity in different species, from mice to elephants, is inversely correlated with the frequency of heartbeats such that on average the total number of heartbeats in a lifetime is approximately constant.
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Reparations from WWI played a big part in creating Nazism. They are an incredibly dangerous evil.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
I think any former American slave should be paid reparations. As they would be coming up to 160 though, it might be a bit late. I can make a far better case for reparations for Native Americans. Or for Vietnam.
A key tenet of Christian morality is that the sins of the father are not vested on the children ("The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father").
Aren't we supposed to be simultaneously grateful for the removal of original sin though? Seems contradictory
(half rembered uncertain doctrine on the internet is the best way of settling theological disputes, I find)
You might enjoy Atheist Sunday School on the subject of Original Sin*
Exercising less would help too. Less breathing going on. I suppose painting the Sahara will be OK, but work will be needed on the tundra, the coniferous forests and most of all painting the sea will be a challenge.
The hard copies of The Guardian would be more environmental if they were pure white instead of having the great thoughts of Polly Toynbee and other equally unreadable clickbait printed on them in heat retaining black.
Loving this doctor!
A biostatistician many years ago made a related point in a presentation I attended. Longevity in different species, from mice to elephants, is inversely correlated with the frequency of heartbeats such that on average the total number of heartbeats in a lifetime is approximately constant.
Fitter people have lower resting heart rates. As people only exercise a small portion of the time, you should expect someone fit to have fewer heartbeats in a year than someone unfit.
Exercising less would help too. Less breathing going on. I suppose painting the Sahara will be OK, but work will be needed on the tundra, the coniferous forests and most of all painting the sea will be a challenge.
The hard copies of The Guardian would be more environmental if they were pure white instead of having the great thoughts of Polly Toynbee and other equally unreadable clickbait printed on them in heat retaining black.
Loving this doctor!
A biostatistician many years ago made a related point in a presentation I attended. Longevity in different species, from mice to elephants, is inversely correlated with the frequency of heartbeats such that on average the total number of heartbeats in a lifetime is approximately constant.
The rest of his advice does dent his credibility somewhat, sadly:
Q: Should I reduce my alcohol intake?
A: No, not at all. Wine made from fruit. Brandy is distilled wine, that mean they take water out of fruity bit so you get even more of goodness that way. Beer also made of grain. Bottom up!
Q: How can I calculate my body/fat ratio?
A: Well, if you have body and you have fat, your ratio one to one. If you have two bodies, your ratio two to one, etc.
Q: What are some of the advantages of participating in a regular exercise program?
A: Can’t think of single one, sorry. My philosophy is: No pain…good!
Q: Aren’t fried foods bad for you?
A: YOU NOT LISTENING! Food are fried these day in vegetable oil. In fact, they permeated by it. How could getting more vegetable be bad for you?!?
Q: Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the middle?
A: Definitely not! When you exercise muscle, it get bigger. You should only be doing sit-up if you want bigger stomach.
Q: Is chocolate bad for me?
A: Are you crazy?!? HEL-LO-O!! Cocoa bean! Another vegetable! It best feel-good food around!
Q: Is swimming good for your figure?
A: If swimming good for your figure, explain whale to me..
Q: Is getting in shape important for my lifestyle?
Exercising less would help too. Less breathing going on. I suppose painting the Sahara will be OK, but work will be needed on the tundra, the coniferous forests and most of all painting the sea will be a challenge.
The hard copies of The Guardian would be more environmental if they were pure white instead of having the great thoughts of Polly Toynbee and other equally unreadable clickbait printed on them in heat retaining black.
Loving this doctor!
A biostatistician many years ago made a related point in a presentation I attended. Longevity in different species, from mice to elephants, is inversely correlated with the frequency of heartbeats such that on average the total number of heartbeats in a lifetime is approximately constant.
Fitter people have lower resting heart rates. As people only exercise a small portion of the time, you should expect someone fit to have fewer heartbeats in a year than someone unfit.
I now understand his logic, and it makes perfect sense. If you print your own currency to sell, and therefore to drive your currency down, then you are absolutely easing monetary conditions. It is - effectively - quantitive easing, albeit with the specific goal of devaluing the currency to boost exports.
However, I think it misses another point. World trade collapsed in the 1930s, because countries reacted to competitive devaluations by raising tariff barriers.
That's a competely different point. I agree to an extent, but you overstate the effects of the tariffs. (See Krugman on this). World trade was collapsing because the world economy was collapsing - the tariff barriers made a terrible situation completely disastrous.
In any case, the original point stands - competitive devaluations were a necessary consequence of loosening of monetary policy, which caused boom conditions in many countries between 1933 and 1937. And in depriving themselves of two of the three instruments of economic policy, the EU is economically illiterate, and the whole premise of the ERM/euro is disastrously wrong.
There's nothing surprising or controversial about this - it has been mainstream economic theory in the UK and the US for decades. Anybody with a higher degree in international macro is well aware of it. But German macroeconomics simply doesn't understand it. And the EU (and, disastrously, the europhiles in the Conservative Party in the late 1980s) bought into the continental European analysis.
Germany has a pathological hatred of inflation because of hyper inflation and the rise of Nazism that it resulted in.
People often say that, but I'm not convinced. It was the Great Depression, not the 1923 inflation, that resulted in the rise of Nazism. The Nazis actually did really badly in elections in 1924 and 1928. Perhaps it was the post-war hyperinflation that caused the German dread of inflation. But Switzerland did not experience either the 1923 or 1946-7 hyperinflations and is even more anti-inflation than Germany.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
Reparations from WWI played a big part in creating Nazism. They are an incredibly dangerous evil.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
I think any former American slave should be paid reparations. As they would be coming up to 160 though, it might be a bit late. I can make a far better case for reparations for Native Americans. Or for Vietnam.
A key tenet of Christian morality is that the sins of the father are not vested on the children ("The son shall not suffer for the iniquity of the father").
That holds here.
Reparations are just a quick way to civil war, and it staggers me that some people seem so blind to this.
Yes, once again like "defund the police" it is a poor choice of terminology. Reparations doesn't have to mean cash, but rather institutionally organised redistribution of wealth to compensate for decades of ingrained social inequality.
So similar to Johnson's professed policy to level up the North.
Historically if you take the 4 general elections since WW2 after one party had been in power for 10 years or more, as will be the case in 2024, the odds favour a change in government.
That was the case in 1964, 1997 and 2010, the only exception being in 1992 where Major's Tories held on despite some losses to Kinnock's Labour.
The question then is whether Starmer is Wilson 1964 or Cameron 2010 and becomes PM or Kinnock 1992 and he narrowly fails to, unless this government performs disastrously he is unlikely to be Blair 1997, more likely he will win narrowly as Wilson did in 1964 or more likely still become PM after a hung parliament as Cameron did in 2010
The other question is whether the change of governing party has already occurred. Does the voting public regard HMG as a Conservative government since 2010 or has the change from Cameron to May to Boris satisfied any putative demand for change?
It might be that in co-opting the popular parts of Jeremy Corbyn's platform and running against Cameron and May-style Conservatism, Boris already is the change prime minister. I'd not be wagering on 2024 based on historical parallels.
ETA I now see @moonshine has made much the same point in the last few minutes.
Boris is certainly much less of a fiscally conservative PM than Cameron was and is arguably now governing even as a social democrat, he has also delivered Brexit obviously which Cameron opposed and a harder Brexit than May wanted too.
So yes there is something in your point that a change of government has occurred already to some extent
If one really wants to be mischievous, what about Johnson as Major redux? Not (so far) the exhausted Major of 1997, but the triumphant Major of May 1992.
Both took over as PM after the Conservatives had been office for a long time and were struggling.
Both ditched the baggage holding the party down (Poll Tax, Brexit faff).
Both were seen as reaching out in a way that other Tories couldn't. If you weren't around at the time, you might not believe it, but the soapbox thing worked.
Both pulled off remarkable victories against an opposition that wasn't really ready for office. Remember, Major's 14.1 million votes still hasn't been beaten.
Both were, in different ways, masters of the art of persuading people that they were on their side.
There are differences of course. Johnson has been much more ruthless at getting rid of potential bastards before they can cause him trouble.
But in 1992, people were saying the same things that they're saying now; that Britain will become like Japan with a single natural party of government. Ten more glorious Conservative years.
But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder.
For those of us that have followed politics for a long time (and indeed have had an interest in history) your last para is quite powerful:
"But then things happened, and Major's strengths that had helped him defy gravity became weaknesses that made the crash all the harder."
As you say, people forget the John Major of 1992, and for that matter the John Major of Gulf war 1. Johnson apologists should take note.
By the way, I once met Major, and to my surprise he was genuinely charismatic, and came across as a genuinely nice chap. It was also, mercifully before the news regarding Edwina came out!
Yes, Major was a much underrated PM. He is also the only party leader since universal suffrage in 1918 to win a general election after more than 10 consecutive years of his party in power.
Boris or Sunak would need to match that to be re elected in 2024
Major is a great bloke and all that but catastrophic with regard to: ERM, where we should never have entertained the idea of going in. The ERM was the forerunner of the Euro. If it had never started we would still be in the EU. If we had joined it the outlook is unthinkable.
And Maastricht. From today's perspective the idea of a Treaty in which every person in the EU becomes an EU citizen is big and bold. It ought to have been vetoed immediately to signal what the UKs long term goals were. But if acceptable to a government (and of course real as opposed to tactical opposition only came from the Tory right and a handful of Labour traditionalists) a referendum should have been the minimum qualification.
It has taken decades to sort both nation and Tory party from this sorry mess.
That's all true. But I don't think the ERM and Maastricht are as much Major's fault - they were messes dropped on his lap by Lawson and Howe respectively, and the other pro-European Big Beasts of the Conservative Party. Given where the Party and the country were around 1989-90, it would not have been realistic to expect him to be even a Hague-style eurosceptic, let alone a Faragiste. Major's opponents in the leadership election were Heseltine and Hurd, after all, both even more europhile than he was.
But his clinging to the shattered corpse of our EU membership today, when even Lawson has given that up, is less explicable..
Like Johnson, Major was good at leaving the various factions thinking he sympathised with them, but whereas Johnson achieves this by telling everyone what they want to hear, Major did so by remaining cagey. Appearing to be the least pro-EU of the serious contenders cleverly got him the top job, but he went on to disappoint the sceptics, and his comments during and after the referendum suggest that he has been skilled at keeping his own views hidden when it suited.
I think that's undoubtedly true. Major wasn't quite the ideology vacuum that say Johnson or Blair are. But he had a great poker face. And it's also certainly true that the Conservative Party was much more europhilic in 1990 than it was in 2016, let alone today.
Back when he was a junior minister, a good friend of mine was a civil servant working as part of his team. This friend was always going on about how brilliant Major was, and we had great fun taking the piss out of his genius-complex since Major had next to no public profile and evidenced little brilliance at the time. When he made the top job my friend did get the last laugh. At least for a while.
It is a huge bonus for a politician to be underestimated. Mrs Thatcher, John Major, Theresa May and Boris Johnson have all reaped huge dividends in this way.
The first three undoubtedly had to brave out the critics. I think actually doing so was helpful only for Maggie - she probably was underestimated a number of times, a serial underestimatee. Major simply became a bunker mentality. May gave herself a little time, but actually finished up not seeing that she wasn't PM material.
I don't really think that people have underestimated Boris.
A lot depends upon how Boris’s story ends. PMs’ stories usually end badly, and in his case the potential for it to end very badly indeed remains considerable.
Has any story ended worse than David Cameron's? Possibly not since Eden.
Mrs May's exit was very humiliating.
Everything about May was humiliating.
Momentarily she achieved astonishing poll numbers.
Her campaign against Corbyn has to be the worst by a conservative leader since Major in 1997. Actually, it was probably worse.
Much worse than Major. Major was already fecked by his own MP's before the Election was called. Mrs May has everything going for until she decided on her madness of screwing the very people whose support she needed. Madness on an epic scale.
It was more than that, though. It was the robotic strong and stable, the reluctance to actually campaign, the lack of anything positive, the hubristic assumption of a big majority incoming, all of which put fear into people of what she’d be like if she actually got one. Meanwhile her chancellor was locked in a cupboard and they couldn’t attack Labour’s spending plans because their own didn’t stack up and had a huge Brexit shaped hole in them. Meanwhile the Tories overstating the case against Corbyn came back to bite them when he turned out to have some worthwhile things to say after all.
What is always forgotten about the 2017 campaign is there were two terrorist outrages (London Bridge and the Ariana Grande concert) and Theresa May, representing the party of law and order against terrorist-loving Jeremy Corbyn, had personally axed 20,000 police officers and had to deny it was a contributing factor.
Exercising less would help too. Less breathing going on. I suppose painting the Sahara will be OK, but work will be needed on the tundra, the coniferous forests and most of all painting the sea will be a challenge.
The hard copies of The Guardian would be more environmental if they were pure white instead of having the great thoughts of Polly Toynbee and other equally unreadable clickbait printed on them in heat retaining black.
Loving this doctor!
A biostatistician many years ago made a related point in a presentation I attended. Longevity in different species, from mice to elephants, is inversely correlated with the frequency of heartbeats such that on average the total number of heartbeats in a lifetime is approximately constant.
Fitter people have lower resting heart rates. As people only exercise a small portion of the time, you should expect someone fit to have fewer heartbeats in a year than someone unfit.
Economist: In Britain and Europe we look at how the bonds that hold the United Kingdom together are fraying.
The union is now weaker than at any point in living memory. The causes are many, but Brexit is the most important. Political leaders in London, Edinburgh and Belfast have put their country at risk by the way they have managed Britain’s departure from the European Union.
Boris Johnson, the prime minister, has done it carelessly, by putting party above country and espousing a hard Brexit. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, has done it determinedly, by exploiting Scots’ dislike of the Brexit settlement. Arlene Foster, first minister of Northern Ireland and head of the Democratic Unionist Party has done it stupidly, by rejecting the softer Brexit proposed by Theresa May, Mr Johnson's predecessor.
If the Scots, Northern Irish or even the Welsh choose to go their own way, they should be allowed to do so—but only once it is clearly their settled will. That is by no means the case yet, and this newspaper hopes it never will be.
An interesting take, as always, by the Economist. But if this influential weekly had understood the dynamics of ordinary people 20 or 30 years before it did it might have done a lot of good. Its intellectual disdain for popular politics is a problem not a solution. It (almost) never got to grips with the democratic deficit or the meaning of ever closer union.
They fail to answer a key question: What is this other sort of Brexit (the unhard one) that would have actually got through the commons? Mrs May would like to know too; she tried. SFAICS Boris got through the nearest thing to the only runner. What should he have done?
And Brexit is not the main driver of disunion either for NI or Scotland. The NI problems go back not to 2016 but more like 1171 and thereafter; and the Scotland issue goes back to the devolution debacle where we end up with Scotland having an alternative government while, say, Yorkshire, with the same population as Scotland looks after local issues. It was a pure danegeld offer, accepted with both hands.
The divisive referendum was pre Brexit. Brexit is not the real issue.
Exactly. The Economist doesn't do its reputation any favours writing that twaddle. Sheesh ...
Comments
https://twitter.com/HawleyMO/status/1382460744172703749?s=20
https://twitter.com/denisewu/status/1382469541515587593?s=20
The boy done good, he's the perfect example of social mobility in action.
I think it might be the influence of Stackelberg. But I'm not sure.
When David Cameron was Prime Minister, he reminded me most strongly of Baldwin. And nothing has changed that view. Both had moments of near-greatness, marred by instances of extreme political & policy cluelessness.
As for endings, when he left office Stanley Baldwin was acclaimed as some kind of wonder-worker, for example for easing Edward VIII off the throne without (too much) fuss & mess.
However, when WWII broke out AND the Blitz began, he quickly morphed into a public hate object, blamed (with some justice) for Britain's shocking lack of preparedness.
Those who are gullible enough to buy into the caricature and take it at face value are guilty of underestimating him. And falling for his caricature.
I read that a commission has been approved by the US Congress to study the idea of reparations to black people in America. Insane.
Whether you like it or not is a different question. It was an achievement May couldn't get.
With Johnson, he does seem to have shied away from the worst of his excesses back in the days of Cummings. Whether this continues remains to be seen.
If you want to see what a really harsh treaty looks like, check out Brest Litovsk.
- defeating communism, probably for a generation (not an SNP generation)
- getting a Brexit deal that most people seem able to live with, though nobody thinks it's perfect
- vaccines (also genetic sequencing)
Not bad for a year and a half.
And I think he's undoubtedly improved since Cummings left.
So what if he was once a working class kid from Sheffield?
He was supposed to be serving the public interest.
Amazingly, so far as I know, we have no Naval history at all.
There are some elements that sailed as passengers to the colonies though. As here though they've made no great splash.
It's a happy day then when I can chat to the Brigadier as though we're almost equals.
(PS. Topping - I am pulling your leg, and I can't promise not to continue either.)
Wtf does this guy know about supply chain finance?
Turns out he knows a fair bit.
They stabbed themselves in the back :-)
And the peace they promised was a no-score draw, not the loss of the war. So it was considered triply unfair in Germany.
To a certain extent the hyper-inflation was due to trying to inflate away the debt....
There's the famous cartoon right? with the '1939 cannon fodder boy' and Clemenceau saying 'curious, I can hear a child crying'
A Yorkshire parliament?!
A 16-year old schoolboy from Bradford makes an exceptionally spirited case here ..
Before we have Indyref 2, we need a vote on Yorkshire devolution
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/politics/independent-yorkshire-devolution-north-england
Both will ignore Middlesborough and Hull.
My favourite cartoon is of a Junker officer holding a copy of Versailles, apoplectic with fury and shouting ‘why, it’s fully a quarter of what we’d have made them pay if we’d won.’
Mainstream economic thought in Britain and America prized price stability over the level of employment until Keynes (that's an oversimplification, but largely true). Keynes and the Great Depression largely changed those priorities. But Continental Europe in general, and especially Germany, was isolated from Keynesian thought.
But if that had been all, Weimar would never have started. There were other problems - for example, the weak and ineffectual democratic systems in place that undermined themselves, and allowed one person to rule by decree under Article 48. Or the corruption of the judiciary. Or the fact that hardly any faction actually supported a democratic system.
Hyperinflation also was partly to help inflate away the debt and boost exports, but it wouldn’t have gone mad in quite the way it did but for the invasion of the Ruhr and the decision of the German government to print money to pay for a general strike.
The reactionary types thought they were getting what they'd always wanted - Kaiserism 2.0 (minus an actual Kaiser), right up until after they "hired" the corporal.
I think broadly I'm a little cowardly - so wouldn't have been suited to the life. I do know though that when I'm angry I'm some sort of medieval monster, unfortunately armed with nancy solcialite type armoury. I guess that's why my biological line has survived.
38,045 news cases
296 deaths in hospital
5,924 in intensive care
Such jealousy I have for them.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/apr/15/whitest-ever-paint-could-help-cool-heating-earth-study-shows
Compared to the risk of a clot after a vaccine, you are six times more likely to be struck by lightning in your lifetime, 11 times more likely to die in a car accident each year ans 100 times more likely to get a blood clot if you use an oral contraceptive. If you are hospitalised with Covid, your risk of a clot is one in four...Some may decide to wait for more safety data to emerge or in the hope herd immunity will protect them without a vaccine. This strategy is much riskier than having the vaccine...Some people get unpleasant temporary side effects from vaccines. But the overall chance of dying, as with just about every modern vaccine, is around one in a million. Paracetamol is much more of a risk.
Over 65s 33% Macron, 28% Bertrand and just 14% Le Pen.
Macron does best with the youngest and oldest voters, Le Pen does best with the middle aged.
If it was just pensioners it would be a Macron v Les Republicains candidate runoff and Le Pen would be eliminated in round 1
Time for my occasional glance at European polling and starting in Spain with the Madrid Regional Election on May 4th and it looks as though the PP are in for a big victory.
Latest poll has PP on 41% (+19) and PSOE on 25% (-2) so that's a hefty 10.5% swing to PP. What's caused this - well, I think we can blame the collapse in Citizens who are down from 19% to 3%. Elsewhere, Greens down three and both VOX and UP up a point and a half.
Madrid is traditionally a centre-right stronghold so a PP win wouldn't be a huge surprise but it'll be interesting to see how much this raises the national profile of the PP leader Isabel Diaz Ayuso as a future high-ranking Cabinet member in a PP Government.
Events in the Netherlands continue to intrigue and it may be, just a couple of weeks after Rutte seemingly won a big victory in the Parliamentary elections, he may well be on his way out.
Looking at French polling, bad though it may well be for Macron whether Bertrand stands or not, the fact remains if he makes it to the final two, he still beats Le Pen comfortably.
The union is now weaker than at any point in living memory. The causes are many, but Brexit is the most important. Political leaders in London, Edinburgh and Belfast have put their country at risk by the way they have managed Britain’s departure from the European Union.
Boris Johnson, the prime minister, has done it carelessly, by putting party above country and espousing a hard Brexit. Nicola Sturgeon, Scotland’s first minister and leader of the Scottish National Party, has done it determinedly, by exploiting Scots’ dislike of the Brexit settlement. Arlene Foster, first minister of Northern Ireland and head of the Democratic Unionist Party has done it stupidly, by rejecting the softer Brexit proposed by Theresa May, Mr Johnson's predecessor.
If the Scots, Northern Irish or even the Welsh choose to go their own way, they should be allowed to do so—but only once it is clearly their settled will. That is by no means the case yet, and this newspaper hopes it never will be.
If however Bertrand was the centre-right candidate and he was in the top 2 in round 1 he could well beat either Macron or Le Pen in the run off
The walls are 90% white paint and half the roof has solar panels
Last time in Round 1 Fillon got 20% with Le Pen on 21.3% - currently Bertrand is ten points behind Macron so he has a lot to do but still has time.
They fail to answer a key question: What is this other sort of Brexit (the unhard one) that would have actually got through the commons? Mrs May would like to know too; she tried. SFAICS Boris got through the nearest thing to the only runner. What should he have done?
And Brexit is not the main driver of disunion either for NI or Scotland. The NI problems go back not to 2016 but more like 1171 and thereafter; and the Scotland issue goes back to the devolution debacle where we end up with Scotland having an alternative government while, say, Yorkshire, with the same population as Scotland looks after local issues. It was a pure danegeld offer, accepted with both hands.
The divisive referendum was pre Brexit. Brexit is not the real issue.
My coastal house is painted a marine blue colour. I was tempted on that colour interspersed with vertical white stripes, but that might look too camp. The blue works.
The hard copies of The Guardian would be more environmental if they were pure white instead of having the great thoughts of Polly Toynbee and other equally unreadable clickbait printed on them in heat retaining black.
Case numbers are always a rear view mirror looking... about two weeks behind.
That holds here.
Reparations are just a quick way to civil war, and it staggers me that some people seem so blind to this.
Even if there is the delayed effect coming through in the next couple of weeks, it's still a pretty unusual pattern as far as the other Western European nations with poor outcomes go.
There's a strange kind of affliction that affects many otherwise intelligent people that they simply can not comprehend Brexit. They simply can't comprehend the democratic problems with the European Union, the desire to control our own laws or the potential for an economic upside.
We get people on this site and the Economist here keen to demonstrate their own blind spot by loudly and vocally denigrating the "populist" majority who disagreed with them and see matters differently.
I wonder whether time will help people get over this affliction and people will start to comprehend what others knew, or if certain people are going to go to their graves screaming about "populists" and "lies" and lest we ever forget that bus.
It's a magazine.
(half rembered uncertain doctrine on the internet is the best way of settling theological disputes, I find)
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/12/16761880/study-austerity-nazi-power-hitler-elections
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeuT3ESe/
*Not a doctrine that I believe BTW.
Q: Should I reduce my alcohol intake?
A: No, not at all. Wine made from fruit. Brandy is distilled wine, that mean they take water out of fruity bit so you get even more of goodness that way. Beer also made of grain. Bottom up!
Q: How can I calculate my body/fat ratio?
A: Well, if you have body and you have fat, your ratio one to one. If you have two bodies, your ratio two to one, etc.
Q: What are some of the advantages of participating in a regular exercise program?
A: Can’t think of single one, sorry. My philosophy is: No pain…good!
Q: Aren’t fried foods bad for you?
A: YOU NOT LISTENING! Food are fried these day in vegetable oil. In fact, they permeated by it. How could getting more vegetable be bad for you?!?
Q: Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the middle?
A: Definitely not! When you exercise muscle, it get bigger. You should only be doing sit-up if you want bigger stomach.
Q: Is chocolate bad for me?
A: Are you crazy?!? HEL-LO-O!! Cocoa bean! Another vegetable! It best feel-good food around!
Q: Is swimming good for your figure?
A: If swimming good for your figure, explain whale to me..
Q: Is getting in shape important for my lifestyle?
A: Hey! ’Round’ is shape!
So similar to Johnson's professed policy to level up the North.