Pardon my ignorance but what on earth is a 'park keeper' that used to exist but doesn't now?
I live with a park on my road, and a children's playground. Its part of what attracted us to this home given we have young kids. It is clean, well-kept, has zero graffiti and is well maintained. I feel comfortable taking my girls to it whenever we want to and letting them run free playing in the park. I see presumably Council staff come to it and cut the grass etc about once a week or so and then go, I've never seen a trash problem or graffiti.
What more should be expected that isn't happening at the minute?
It was like police houses etc. The job was pretty poorly paid that to attract people you provide attached housing. The park keeper, like a school caretaker would live within the site.
Sturgeon's policy is for Scotland to use the currency of a foreign country, not have its own currency. So all its borrowing would be in a foreign currency. There are plenty of examples of countries being unable to borrow in foreign currencies to finance large fiscal deficits.
Worth reading the thread for the level of stupidity we can expect.
Scotland demanding a share of the Bank of England without understanding that that wouldn't help them at all as with 90% of the economy and 90% of the vote any Scottish desires would be ignored. In the way that the ECB did nothing to stop asset inflation in Ireland due to low interest rates prior to 2008.
The worrying thing is - A large chunk of Scots believe this. Presumably helped by the SNPs failure in education over the last 14 years
It goes back longer than 14 years - just look at MalcolmG
The arguments for Independence really only work if you present 5 objectives and hope people don't grasp prior to voting for it that at least 3 of them are mutually exclusive.
One thing that has happened under the SNP is the eradication of British history from the curriculum. My 3 children did not choose history for Standard / Nat 5 grade (GCSE equivalent) and so only did topics through primary and junior school and the first 2 years of senior school. Those topics were the Ancient Egyptians, the Scottish Wars of Independence (against the English), the Jacobites (again, against the English), WW2 (the experience in Edinburgh, no British common thread), Slavery (how bad it was, not Wilberforce and the role of the Royal Navy in ending the trade and no hint of Scottish profit from the trade), and finally US Civil Rights. My kids only have an understanding of wider British history because I have bored them with it.
In a generation, the SNP will have succeeded in separating a generation of kids from any understanding of, or involvement in, a British identity.
Which is damning to be honest, as the Scots played a vital role in the UK (for all its positives and negatives)
Basically erased to turn into a weird history of apparently being a colony of the UK etc. I think that’s a UK govt failure of letting it happen tbh
Sturgeon's policy is for Scotland to use the currency of a foreign country, not have its own currency. So all its borrowing would be in a foreign currency. There are plenty of examples of countries being unable to borrow in foreign currencies to finance large fiscal deficits.
Worth reading the thread for the level of stupidity we can expect.
Scotland demanding a share of the Bank of England without understanding that that wouldn't help them at all as with 90% of the economy and 90% of the vote any Scottish desires would be ignored. In the way that the ECB did nothing to stop asset inflation in Ireland due to low interest rates prior to 2008.
The worrying thing is - A large chunk of Scots believe this. Presumably helped by the SNPs failure in education over the last 14 years
It goes back longer than 14 years - just look at MalcolmG
The arguments for Independence really only work if you present 5 objectives and hope people don't grasp prior to voting for it that at least 3 of them are mutually exclusive.
One thing that has happened under the SNP is the eradication of British history from the curriculum. My 3 children did not choose history for Standard / Nat 5 grade (GCSE equivalent) and so only did topics through primary and junior school and the first 2 years of senior school. Those topics were the Ancient Egyptians, the Scottish Wars of Independence (against the English), the Jacobites (again, against the English), WW2 (the experience in Edinburgh, no British common thread), Slavery (how the bad it was, not Wilberforce and the role of the Royal Navy in ending the trade and no hint of Scottish profit from the trade), and finally US Civil Rights. My kids only have an understanding of wider British history because I have bored them with it.
In a generation, the SNP will have succeeded in separating a generation of kids from any understanding of, or involvement in, a British identity.
No guarantee that will see them win a referendum though.
I did my high schooling in the 1990s in Victoria, Australia and the education there is rather similar. Anything negative in history is assigned to "the British" while anything positive to "Australians" when typically they're both the same people. We studied things like Captain Cook and the early settlements (and how the British wiped out Tasmania's aboriginal population); the 1850s Gold Rush with trips to the Sovereign Hill Museum (and how the British taxed and shot at miners); the Stolen Generation (awful); Gallipoli, Gallipoli, Gallipoli and Gallipoli (how brave Aussies were sent to die by the British). Only the latter one were the negatives really justifiably British rather than Australian when drawing a difference.
Still the Referendum went against cutting ties to the old country in 1999.
I'm the same sort of age as you - 46 - and my memory of the seventies is that it was scruffy, dusty, unfinished, and covered in litter and graffiti. There is too much public squalor today and I would happily introduce the death penalty for graffiti, but I think the level of public squalor has declined since I was very small. Park keepers are an odd one - it's hard to believe they ever really existed outside the pages of Saturday morning comics. But are parks nowadays any less well-kept than in the 70s? My memory may be playing tricks on me but I don't think so. Social housing today is much, much better than that delivered at any point in the last 60 years. I've never had a problem ringing the doctor and getting an appointment the same day. In fact, again, GPs provide a far better level of customer service nowadays than I can remember at any time in the past. (Doctors are also much friendlier than the aloof and supercilious one I remember from my youth, though I may just have been unlucky back then!) What else is better today? Schools, public transport*, waste disposal, roads - the list goes on. There are few things you can convincingly make a case that the state does that it did better at any point in my 46 years on the planet. In short, I'd like the country to have better public services - but in my limited experience the state provides a better lot for its citizens than pretty much at any time in the past.
*granted I was born at something of a nadir for public transport - I think PT probably was better before mass car ownership.
Interesting discussion. I broadly agree, though my past experience is limited as I was only around as a small child in the 50s and then for a few years in the 80s, before coming back as an MP in 1997. In the 80s, my recollection was that doctors and vets did house calls much more readily than they do now, and public services are clearly struggling, but in other respects I also think Britain looks a good deal better than in the 80s - much cleaner streets (maybe better tech has helped there) and a more diverse culture, more obviously seen through diverse food options but also in less obvious ways. Britain used to be quite narrow-minded on all kinds of things - sex, foreigners, food, travel - and is much less so now, ast least in the big cities. The sense of general disgruntlement is much the same, though, and seems a permanent feature of British culture which I didn't encounter as much in other countries.
NEW: Poll of 1,500 Scots for @STVNews has SNP on course for a majority in tomorrow’s election, winning 50% of constituency vote to give the follow seat projection.
Sturgeon's policy is for Scotland to use the currency of a foreign country, not have its own currency. So all its borrowing would be in a foreign currency. There are plenty of examples of countries being unable to borrow in foreign currencies to finance large fiscal deficits.
Worth reading the thread for the level of stupidity we can expect.
Scotland demanding a share of the Bank of England without understanding that that wouldn't help them at all as with 90% of the economy and 90% of the vote any Scottish desires would be ignored. In the way that the ECB did nothing to stop asset inflation in Ireland due to low interest rates prior to 2008.
The worrying thing is - A large chunk of Scots believe this. Presumably helped by the SNPs failure in education over the last 14 years
It goes back longer than 14 years - just look at MalcolmG
The arguments for Independence really only work if you present 5 objectives and hope people don't grasp prior to voting for it that at least 3 of them are mutually exclusive.
One thing that has happened under the SNP is the eradication of British history from the curriculum. My 3 children did not choose history for Standard / Nat 5 grade (GCSE equivalent) and so only did topics through primary and junior school and the first 2 years of senior school. Those topics were the Ancient Egyptians, the Scottish Wars of Independence (against the English), the Jacobites (again, against the English), WW2 (the experience in Edinburgh, no British common thread), Slavery (how the bad it was, not Wilberforce and the role of the Royal Navy in ending the trade and no hint of Scottish profit from the trade), and finally US Civil Rights. My kids only have an understanding of wider British history because I have bored them with it.
In a generation, the SNP will have succeeded in separating a generation of kids from any understanding of, or involvement in, a British identity.
No guarantee that will see them win a referendum though.
I did my high schooling in the 1990s in Victoria, Australia and the education there is rather similar. Anything negative in history is assigned to "the British" while anything positive to "Australians" when typically they're both the same people. We studied things like Captain Cook and the early settlements (and how the British wiped out Tasmania's aboriginal population); the 1850s Gold Rush with trips to the Sovereign Hill Museum (and how the British taxed and shot at miners); the Stolen Generation (awful); Gallipoli, Gallipoli, Gallipoli and Gallipoli (how brave Aussies were sent to die by the British). Only the latter one were the negatives really justifiably British rather than Australian when drawing a difference.
Still the Referendum went against cutting ties to the old country in 1999.
You may well be right. The dynamic is complex though - the overlapping Venn diagrams of Scottish, British, English and European identity overlaid with another of strong anti-Toryism / Brexit is a heady mix. In discussion with friends, the pro-Union ones see British identity as their key driver. The pro-SNP ones see anti-Toryism as their key driver.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
Needless to say, this Tory Red Waller disagrees with you. I'm not old enough to remember the seventies (or be alive then) but am curious what about the winter of discontent and the seventies in general met your description.
New Labour spent money until they ran out of it, but they had no long term solutions. The Tories have delivered for parts of the country and its time they deliver for the North too.
Ha ha, I'd be gobsmacked if you agreed with me! And no doubt we would come at the winter of discontent and the 70s from ideological opposites to.
I don't personally remember this golden age, I'm roughly the same age as you I think, I'm 43. But when I was a nipper you could ring your doctor, the phone would be answered straightaway, and you would get an appointment the same day. The local park had tennis courts and a bowling green and a permanent keeper who maintained them. All that kind of stuff has gone. Long gone.
The point I am making is that many, many red wallers of my acquaintance, who I discuss all this with, want a return to that world that existed when they were young, in the 50s and 60s, to well-funded public services, including social care and unemployment benefits, park keepers, all that kind of thing, that require higher taxes on business and well off individuals. Social housing, but not the brutalist concrete monstrosities of the past. And the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years have manifestly failed to deliver any of that, in fact they have constantly chipped away at it.
The return of all that stuff is what they expect of Brexit.
The point about park keepers and public tennis courts is one that has puzzled me ... that is, how come we could afford things like that in the 60s and 70s? Were they really halcyon days? I don't think it is to do with higher taxes back then (and by that I mean "take" not "rates") although I could be wrong there.
I think it's to do with what we (and by that I mean government) choose to spend money on - and I think New Labour has a lot to answer for here. Would you rather have park keepers and gardeners or would you prefer diversity officers and translation services for a million and one obscure languages? I know what I'd prefer, what I'd value as a taxpayer.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
I think too, life was pretty grim in the 1950's and 1960's if you had little money, and lived in a poor district. Housing was certainly worse, in general, than it is today.
Taxes were not, in general, higher then, than they are now, nor public spending as a share of national income. And, we spent a lot more, as a share of national income, on the armed forces than we do today. But, where there is a big difference was demography. The population was significantly younger. We spend much less on pensions and health care than we do today. That freed up money for other things.
I'm the same sort of age as you - 46 - and my memory of the seventies is that it was scruffy, dusty, unfinished, and covered in litter and graffiti. There is too much public squalor today and I would happily introduce the death penalty for graffiti, but I think the level of public squalor has declined since I was very small. Park keepers are an odd one - it's hard to believe they ever really existed outside the pages of Saturday morning comics. But are parks nowadays any less well-kept than in the 70s? My memory may be playing tricks on me but I don't think so. Social housing today is much, much better than that delivered at any point in the last 60 years. I've never had a problem ringing the doctor and getting an appointment the same day. In fact, again, GPs provide a far better level of customer service nowadays than I can remember at any time in the past. (Doctors are also much friendlier than the aloof and supercilious one I remember from my youth, though I may just have been unlucky back then!) What else is better today? Schools, public transport*, waste disposal, roads - the list goes on. There are few things you can convincingly make a case that the state does that it did better at any point in my 46 years on the planet. In short, I'd like the country to have better public services - but in my limited experience the state provides a better lot for its citizens than pretty much at any time in the past.
*granted I was born at something of a nadir for public transport - I think PT probably was better before mass car ownership.
I feel much safer now than I did in the 70s. As a young man I was very conscious of the thugs that were out and about. Maybe it is better because I am now much older, or may be it is just a lot safer.
Probably because you are older. Young men attack other young men - out of sexual rivalry, ultimately. Darwinian, innit. Despite the odd horror headline young men very rarely attack much older men, unless they have the express purpose of robbery, or revenge
Also, there is no kudos in beating up a pensioner. So you ARE safer
I think there's more to it than that. I think it is genuinely a less violent society. I was put in mind of this re-watching 'Chance in a Million' - the sort of pre-watershed sitcom we don't really get any more but which used to be ubiquitous - and the theme of 'having a fight' cropped up far more often than you would expect in a way which looks very jarring now. And it occurred to me this was generally true of popular culture: the idea of having a fight used to be crop up in the 70s and 80s far more often than it does nowadays. (I'm still thinking of sitcoms here - but sitcoms give a much better picture, I think, of what life was actually like than dramas or films). Now this is all what it feels like, rather than based on anything objective: granted, I am middle aged now and also of a size that might discourage the casually violent, so I neither see nor perceive the threat of violence. But I think today's society is genuinely less violent than that of the previous generation. (Above a level of post-last-orders drunken violence, which has always existed.) I have heard it suggested that this has been due to the move to unleaded fuel (i.e. the particular form of air pollution resulting from leaded fuels made people violent.)
Debates about an independent Scotland and currency and debt are exactly the kind of "arguments" that only help Yes win. Anyway, the counter argument is that so many other states manage to become independent without the kind of project fear disaster being suggested.
Slovakia being a case in point. Dissolves the union and splits from its richer neighbour. Initially both use the same currency, then quickly national versions of the same currency, and later the Euro. Slovakia started as the poor neighbour with GDP per capita 20% lower than the Czechs, but after years of faster growth is now drawing level.
Besides which, I expect* Scotland to adopt Bitcoin as its national currency
Debates about an independent Scotland and currency and debt are exactly the kind of "arguments" that only help Yes win. Anyway, the counter argument is that so many other states manage to become independent without the kind of project fear disaster being suggested.
Slovakia being a case in point. Dissolves the union and splits from its richer neighbour. Initially both use the same currency, then quickly national versions of the same currency, and later the Euro. Slovakia started as the poor neighbour with GDP per capita 20% lower than the Czechs, but after years of faster growth is now drawing level.
Besides which, I expect* Scotland to adopt Bitcoin as its national currency
You are right. The thing you don't say is that salaries in Slovakia are now about 10% lower than in the Czech republic.
If Scotland votes for Independence then I have a vested interest in it being successful - I live in Edinburgh. What worries me is that the SNP have not used their existing powers to implement policies to really grow our economy so that we can cope with losing the £2k/head subsidy from the UK government. I dread the tax and spend decisions that a newly independent Scotland must make otherwise. Could we overcome that period - absolutely. But it would be hell for a generation at least.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
That strikes me as a very Little England view, and I agree that is why Labour are struggling.
Little Englanders are in the ascendancy and the Tories are their party, for now.
Call it a Little England view if you like but it's becoming a Bigger England view as the woke BS increases. I'm not sure how Labour copes with that. Does it even want to?
You're relying on the young becoming less "woke" as they grow older. They probably will not. The Overton window will simply shift, as it has done over the past 100 years. Believing in gay marriage used to be woke af.
I'm not relying on anything; I'm just musing about what I see around me.
I don't see this as a young versus old debate, actually, in the way that in the past many people (myself included) went from left-of-centre to right-of-centre politically as they grew older, mostly to do with economics (when you've got nothing to lose financially it's easy to vote Labour) and less to do with social issues.
The divide we are seeing today is more about values, a sense of fair play and common sense. People of all ages, who maybe didn't take much notice of politics unless it affected them personally, are starting to notice now that they need to be careful what they say, that they need to take mandatory "training" in the workplace to re-educate them, that the BBC can't make a decent comedy any more, and so on.
When freedom of speech / expression is curtailed, when your job is threatened, when there is no such thing as a joke any more (because all jokes have a butt, right?) people start to notice and they notice which politicians stand where on these issues.
When the Overton Window shifts gradually then most people just shuffle along with it (your gay marriage example) ... but when it shifts quickly and dramatically (the "woke" phenomenon), and ordinary, decent people find themselves on the wrong side of it, guess what? They push back.
"There is a grand deal to be done with Brussels to keep Scotland in the union. European leaders are no fans of separatism. From Catalonia to Flanders and Transylvania to the Basques, most have separatist movements of their own they are keen to quash. As they did during the 2014 independence campaign, senior EU figures have quietly suggested to our ministers that they are prepared to be very helpful on an independent Scotland’s ambitions to rejoin the EU: a rejection that would kill Sturgeon’s project dead.
But the EU has a price: an agreement to heal the festering sore that is the Northern Ireland Protocol once and for all. It wants the UK to align to a thinned-down book of EU standards on food and agriculture, a move that would slash the need for the lion’s share of disruptive and costly border checks on imports into the province from the British mainland in a stroke. Some ministers in Johnson’s Cabinet also want closer alignment on sanitary and phytosanitary measures (as they’re technically known), and have pressed Brexit negotiator Lord Frost on it. And I understand this is now happening.
Frost and his opposite number in the EU, Commission vice president Maroš Šefčovič, are inching towards agreeing a set of common standards on agri-food. It won’t be called alignment (No10 prefers the terms “equivalence”). It may even involve the option to diverge if the UK feels it must, to avoid the incandescent rage of hardline Brexiteers who insist the UK must never again be beholden to Brussels on anything. But it amounts to the same thing."
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
That's true, but just saying "tough luck" to those priced out of the market isn't an answer either.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
The mystery is - how come inflation has disappeared as in theory it shouldn't have done given the amount of printing within the economy..
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
Needless to say, this Tory Red Waller disagrees with you. I'm not old enough to remember the seventies (or be alive then) but am curious what about the winter of discontent and the seventies in general met your description.
New Labour spent money until they ran out of it, but they had no long term solutions. The Tories have delivered for parts of the country and its time they deliver for the North too.
Ha ha, I'd be gobsmacked if you agreed with me! And no doubt we would come at the winter of discontent and the 70s from ideological opposites to.
I don't personally remember this golden age, I'm roughly the same age as you I think, I'm 43. But when I was a nipper you could ring your doctor, the phone would be answered straightaway, and you would get an appointment the same day. The local park had tennis courts and a bowling green and a permanent keeper who maintained them. All that kind of stuff has gone. Long gone.
The point I am making is that many, many red wallers of my acquaintance, who I discuss all this with, want a return to that world that existed when they were young, in the 50s and 60s, to well-funded public services, including social care and unemployment benefits, park keepers, all that kind of thing, that require higher taxes on business and well off individuals. Social housing, but not the brutalist concrete monstrosities of the past. And the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years have manifestly failed to deliver any of that, in fact they have constantly chipped away at it.
The return of all that stuff is what they expect of Brexit.
The point about park keepers and public tennis courts is one that has puzzled me ... that is, how come we could afford things like that in the 60s and 70s? Were they really halcyon days? I don't think it is to do with higher taxes back then (and by that I mean "take" not "rates") although I could be wrong there.
I think it's to do with what we (and by that I mean government) choose to spend money on - and I think New Labour has a lot to answer for here. Would you rather have park keepers and gardeners or would you prefer diversity officers and translation services for a million and one obscure languages? I know what I'd prefer, what I'd value as a taxpayer.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
Labour is too expensive now. That's the plain truth of it, especially in the public sector.
True, especially when you factor in public sector pension costs, but that doesn't stop you hiring a park keeper rather than a diversity officer. In fact, I'd bet you could hire two park keepers for the price of one office non-job and get a lot more value for money.
Why doesn't the public sector just offer employees defined contribution pensions like everyone else?
I've had this argument previously - and the reply back was that it is too expensive* ! Defined Cont being too expensive compared to DB is true only if you believe David Copperfield really can make the Eiffel Tower disappear. *Accounting technicalities
The thing is that the public sector never really had a proper DB scheme. The Government never funded it properly; the benefits were just paid out of taxation receipts as and when they fell due. Which is bad (because effectively it's a Ponzi scheme that starts to fall apart if demographics change sharply), but workable as long as you never change it.
The issue with moving to a DC scheme is that they would then have to put actual money into actual accounts with each employee's name on it, as opposed to the current system of just adding it to a notional liability to be paid at some point in the future. This would mean they suddenly had to find money each year for two groups of individuals: retired workers, whose pensions were never funded properly so now have to be paid out of taxation, and current workers, whose pensions need to be funded now, and so Government would need to borrow (lots) to meet the extra commitments.
In short, it would be a huge win in the long term, because it solves the Ponzi issue and transfers a lot of the current risks onto individuals from the Government (read: the rest of us), but looks catastrophic for public finances in the short term.
That’s generalising too far - local government always had a funded scheme (covering teachers as well as local council staff) as did the Post Office/BT. Both very big schemes indeed.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
That strikes me as a very Little England view, and I agree that is why Labour are struggling.
Little Englanders are in the ascendancy and the Tories are their party, for now.
Call it a Little England view if you like but it's becoming a Bigger England view as the woke BS increases. I'm not sure how Labour copes with that. Does it even want to?
You're relying on the young becoming less "woke" as they grow older. They probably will not. The Overton window will simply shift, as it has done over the past 100 years. Believing in gay marriage used to be woke af.
I'm not relying on anything; I'm just musing about what I see around me.
I don't see this as a young versus old debate, actually, in the way that in the past many people (myself included) went from left-of-centre to right-of-centre politically as they grew older, mostly to do with economics (when you've got nothing to lose financially it's easy to vote Labour) and less to do with social issues.
The divide we are seeing today is more about values, a sense of fair play and common sense. People of all ages, who maybe didn't take much notice of politics unless it affected them personally, are starting to notice now that they need to be careful what they say, that they need to take mandatory "training" in the workplace to re-educate them, that the BBC can't make a decent comedy any more, and so on.
When freedom of speech / expression is curtailed, when your job is threatened, when there is no such thing as a joke any more (because all jokes have a butt, right?) people start to notice and they notice which politicians stand where on these issues.
When the Overton Window shifts gradually then most people just shuffle along with it (your gay marriage example) ... but when it shifts quickly and dramatically (the "woke" phenomenon), and ordinary, decent people find themselves on the wrong side of it, guess what? They push back.
Yes, famously absolutely no push back against repealing Section 28 or Gay Marriage.
Pardon my ignorance but what on earth is a 'park keeper' that used to exist but doesn't now?
I live with a park on my road, and a children's playground. Its part of what attracted us to this home given we have young kids. It is clean, well-kept, has zero graffiti and is well maintained. I feel comfortable taking my girls to it whenever we want to and letting them run free playing in the park. I see presumably Council staff come to it and cut the grass etc about once a week or so and then go, I've never seen a trash problem or graffiti.
What more should be expected that isn't happening at the minute?
The difference is that most councils moved away from static staff based in the park, to mobile teams who travel round in a van and deal with jobs in different locations during a day. The latter is more financially efficient, but it’s a debate similar to that you get with the police and bobbies on the beat - people prefer park keepers because they can get to know the person, and they’re almost always around. Often a static park keeper will show a lot of ownership of ‘their’ park and do all sorts of other ‘extra mile’ stuff, like looking after lost property, that mobile teams cannot do.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
That strikes me as a very Little England view, and I agree that is why Labour are struggling.
Little Englanders are in the ascendancy and the Tories are their party, for now.
Call it a Little England view if you like but it's becoming a Bigger England view as the woke BS increases. I'm not sure how Labour copes with that. Does it even want to?
You're relying on the young becoming less "woke" as they grow older. They probably will not. The Overton window will simply shift, as it has done over the past 100 years. Believing in gay marriage used to be woke af.
I'm not relying on anything; I'm just musing about what I see around me.
I don't see this as a young versus old debate, actually, in the way that in the past many people (myself included) went from left-of-centre to right-of-centre politically as they grew older, mostly to do with economics (when you've got nothing to lose financially it's easy to vote Labour) and less to do with social issues.
The divide we are seeing today is more about values, a sense of fair play and common sense. People of all ages, who maybe didn't take much notice of politics unless it affected them personally, are starting to notice now that they need to be careful what they say, that they need to take mandatory "training" in the workplace to re-educate them, that the BBC can't make a decent comedy any more, and so on.
When freedom of speech / expression is curtailed, when your job is threatened, when there is no such thing as a joke any more (because all jokes have a butt, right?) people start to notice and they notice which politicians stand where on these issues.
When the Overton Window shifts gradually then most people just shuffle along with it (your gay marriage example) ... but when it shifts quickly and dramatically (the "woke" phenomenon), and ordinary, decent people find themselves on the wrong side of it, guess what? They push back.
Yes, famously absolutely no push back against repealing Section 28 or Gay Marriage.
No doubt there was, but not really by the vast majority of people? Did those issues really affect the vote of the "ordinary man in the street"?
Sturgeon says she WON’T hold a referendum if Boris says No
Am now confused
‘Nicola Sturgeon here confirming that if she doesn't get a Section 30 order from the UK Government, then there will be no wildcat independence referendum.
Agent P lying about what Sturgeon said? Well I never. Even providing the video to show they are lying about takes moxie though.
She did not say if she doesn't get a Section 30 order she will not hold a referendum. She said she would not hold an illegal referendum.
But if you remember the plan the SNP published the idea is to pass the legislation to hold the referendum then get the UK Government to sue to prove its illegality.
If the UK gov don't sue the it is de facto legal. If they do sue it goes to the courts.
No… just because the UK doesn’t sue doesn’t make it legal “ipso facto” or anything else.
Sturgeon's policy is for Scotland to use the currency of a foreign country, not have its own currency. So all its borrowing would be in a foreign currency. There are plenty of examples of countries being unable to borrow in foreign currencies to finance large fiscal deficits.
Worth reading the thread for the level of stupidity we can expect.
Scotland demanding a share of the Bank of England without understanding that that wouldn't help them at all as with 90% of the economy and 90% of the vote any Scottish desires would be ignored. In the way that the ECB did nothing to stop asset inflation in Ireland due to low interest rates prior to 2008.
The worrying thing is - A large chunk of Scots believe this. Presumably helped by the SNPs failure in education over the last 14 years
It goes back longer than 14 years - just look at MalcolmG
The arguments for Independence really only work if you present 5 objectives and hope people don't grasp prior to voting for it that at least 3 of them are mutually exclusive.
One thing that has happened under the SNP is the eradication of British history from the curriculum. My 3 children did not choose history for Standard / Nat 5 grade (GCSE equivalent) and so only did topics through primary and junior school and the first 2 years of senior school. Those topics were the Ancient Egyptians, the Scottish Wars of Independence (against the English), the Jacobites (again, against the English), WW2 (the experience in Edinburgh, no British common thread), Slavery (how the bad it was, not Wilberforce and the role of the Royal Navy in ending the trade and no hint of Scottish profit from the trade), and finally US Civil Rights. My kids only have an understanding of wider British history because I have bored them with it.
In a generation, the SNP will have succeeded in separating a generation of kids from any understanding of, or involvement in, a British identity.
No guarantee that will see them win a referendum though.
I did my high schooling in the 1990s in Victoria, Australia and the education there is rather similar. Anything negative in history is assigned to "the British" while anything positive to "Australians" when typically they're both the same people. We studied things like Captain Cook and the early settlements (and how the British wiped out Tasmania's aboriginal population); the 1850s Gold Rush with trips to the Sovereign Hill Museum (and how the British taxed and shot at miners); the Stolen Generation (awful); Gallipoli, Gallipoli, Gallipoli and Gallipoli (how brave Aussies were sent to die by the British). Only the latter one were the negatives really justifiably British rather than Australian when drawing a difference.
Still the Referendum went against cutting ties to the old country in 1999.
It is a welcome improvement , when I was a boy we were taught ZERO on Scottish history , it was England and Empire only
"There is a grand deal to be done with Brussels to keep Scotland in the union. European leaders are no fans of separatism. From Catalonia to Flanders and Transylvania to the Basques, most have separatist movements of their own they are keen to quash. As they did during the 2014 independence campaign, senior EU figures have quietly suggested to our ministers that they are prepared to be very helpful on an independent Scotland’s ambitions to rejoin the EU: a rejection that would kill Sturgeon’s project dead.
But the EU has a price: an agreement to heal the festering sore that is the Northern Ireland Protocol once and for all. It wants the UK to align to a thinned-down book of EU standards on food and agriculture, a move that would slash the need for the lion’s share of disruptive and costly border checks on imports into the province from the British mainland in a stroke. Some ministers in Johnson’s Cabinet also want closer alignment on sanitary and phytosanitary measures (as they’re technically known), and have pressed Brexit negotiator Lord Frost on it. And I understand this is now happening.
Frost and his opposite number in the EU, Commission vice president Maroš Šefčovič, are inching towards agreeing a set of common standards on agri-food. It won’t be called alignment (No10 prefers the terms “equivalence”). It may even involve the option to diverge if the UK feels it must, to avoid the incandescent rage of hardline Brexiteers who insist the UK must never again be beholden to Brussels on anything. But it amounts to the same thing."
Debates about an independent Scotland and currency and debt are exactly the kind of "arguments" that only help Yes win. Anyway, the counter argument is that so many other states manage to become independent without the kind of project fear disaster being suggested.
Slovakia being a case in point. Dissolves the union and splits from its richer neighbour. Initially both use the same currency, then quickly national versions of the same currency, and later the Euro. Slovakia started as the poor neighbour with GDP per capita 20% lower than the Czechs, but after years of faster growth is now drawing level.
Besides which, I expect* Scotland to adopt Bitcoin as its national currency
That is heresy to the Scotch experts on here, don't you know we are a basket case and will be begging to come back in a fortnight, pensionless and poverty stricken.
Comments
A time long gone.
Basically erased to turn into a weird history of apparently being a colony of the UK etc. I think that’s a UK govt failure of letting it happen tbh
I did my high schooling in the 1990s in Victoria, Australia and the education there is rather similar. Anything negative in history is assigned to "the British" while anything positive to "Australians" when typically they're both the same people. We studied things like Captain Cook and the early settlements (and how the British wiped out Tasmania's aboriginal population); the 1850s Gold Rush with trips to the Sovereign Hill Museum (and how the British taxed and shot at miners); the Stolen Generation (awful); Gallipoli, Gallipoli, Gallipoli and Gallipoli (how brave Aussies were sent to die by the British). Only the latter one were the negatives really justifiably British rather than Australian when drawing a difference.
Still the Referendum went against cutting ties to the old country in 1999.
specifically, out of interest?
I was put in mind of this re-watching 'Chance in a Million' - the sort of pre-watershed sitcom we don't really get any more but which used to be ubiquitous - and the theme of 'having a fight' cropped up far more often than you would expect in a way which looks very jarring now. And it occurred to me this was generally true of popular culture: the idea of having a fight used to be crop up in the 70s and 80s far more often than it does nowadays. (I'm still thinking of sitcoms here - but sitcoms give a much better picture, I think, of what life was actually like than dramas or films).
Now this is all what it feels like, rather than based on anything objective: granted, I am middle aged now and also of a size that might discourage the casually violent, so I neither see nor perceive the threat of violence. But I think today's society is genuinely less violent than that of the previous generation. (Above a level of post-last-orders drunken violence, which has always existed.)
I have heard it suggested that this has been due to the move to unleaded fuel (i.e. the particular form of air pollution resulting from leaded fuels made people violent.)
Slovakia being a case in point. Dissolves the union and splits from its richer neighbour. Initially both use the same currency, then quickly national versions of the same currency, and later the Euro. Slovakia started as the poor neighbour with GDP per capita 20% lower than the Czechs, but after years of faster growth is now drawing level.
Besides which, I expect* Scotland to adopt Bitcoin as its national currency
https://www.politico.eu/coronavirus-in-europe/
If Scotland votes for Independence then I have a vested interest in it being successful - I live in Edinburgh. What worries me is that the SNP have not used their existing powers to implement policies to really grow our economy so that we can cope with losing the £2k/head subsidy from the UK government. I dread the tax and spend decisions that a newly independent Scotland must make otherwise. Could we overcome that period - absolutely. But it would be hell for a generation at least.
I don't see this as a young versus old debate, actually, in the way that in the past many people (myself included) went from left-of-centre to right-of-centre politically as they grew older, mostly to do with economics (when you've got nothing to lose financially it's easy to vote Labour) and less to do with social issues.
The divide we are seeing today is more about values, a sense of fair play and common sense. People of all ages, who maybe didn't take much notice of politics unless it affected them personally, are starting to notice now that they need to be careful what they say, that they need to take mandatory "training" in the workplace to re-educate them, that the BBC can't make a decent comedy any more, and so on.
When freedom of speech / expression is curtailed, when your job is threatened, when there is no such thing as a joke any more (because all jokes have a butt, right?) people start to notice and they notice which politicians stand where on these issues.
When the Overton Window shifts gradually then most people just shuffle along with it (your gay marriage example) ... but when it shifts quickly and dramatically (the "woke" phenomenon), and ordinary, decent people find themselves on the wrong side of it, guess what? They push back.
"There is a grand deal to be done with Brussels to keep Scotland in the union. European leaders are no fans of separatism. From Catalonia to Flanders and Transylvania to the Basques, most have separatist movements of their own they are keen to quash. As they did during the 2014 independence campaign, senior EU figures have quietly suggested to our ministers that they are prepared to be very helpful on an independent Scotland’s ambitions to rejoin the EU: a rejection that would kill Sturgeon’s project dead.
But the EU has a price: an agreement to heal the festering sore that is the Northern Ireland Protocol once and for all. It wants the UK to align to a thinned-down book of EU standards on food and agriculture, a move that would slash the need for the lion’s share of disruptive and costly border checks on imports into the province from the British mainland in a stroke. Some ministers in Johnson’s Cabinet also want closer alignment on sanitary and phytosanitary measures (as they’re technically known), and have pressed Brexit negotiator Lord Frost on it. And I understand this is now happening.
Frost and his opposite number in the EU, Commission vice president Maroš Šefčovič, are inching towards agreeing a set of common standards on agri-food. It won’t be called alignment (No10 prefers the terms “equivalence”). It may even involve the option to diverge if the UK feels it must, to avoid the incandescent rage of hardline Brexiteers who insist the UK must never again be beholden to Brussels on anything. But it amounts to the same thing."
https://www.standard.co.uk/comment/no10-scottish-independence-boris-johnson-nicola-sturgeon-b933342.html