We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
How long ago was it when Scott was pasting predictions of mass unemployment ?
Why is there unemployment and a huge labour shortage at the same time, what are the lazy barstewards lounging on the dole living it up not forced at gunpoint to get their arse's out the door and do a day's work.
The system of dispersing asylum seekers across the country is uneven, with some areas accommodating far more than others - and 32% of local authorities not taking any at all, according to a House of Commons library report.
Areas with lower than average household income have tended to accept more asylum seekers - the North East of England has the highest number per 1,000 resident population - 17 times greater than the South-East.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
Perhaps the country is better off without jobs people cannot afford to do and require an endless stream of migrant workers to be exploited.
oh, so let's close the restaurants, pubs, fresh fruit farms and small retail, warehouses, the country would be so much better off? Our local temp agencies are full of adverts with minimum wage labels.
It really is amazing, the 2.3m EU workers are stopping the entire UK workforce from disintegrating according to some people.
What do you think think the other 30 million workers are doing ?
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
I'm loving your inflation is good narrative. First it was supply/ demand inflation will reduce the deficit, now wage-price spiral inflation saves the economy.
I think I can throw my 1980s A Level Economics textbook in the bin.
Of course you can throw your 1980s textbook into the bin, much has changed in the past 40 years.
How does your 1980s textbook deal with deflation? Or quantitative easing? Etc
I never said we should have wage-price spiral inflation. Having real pay rises doesn't mean a wage-price spiral, indeed kind of by definition it doesn't since if there is such a spiral then the pay rise isn't real.
What mysticism is this of which you speak?
The rules are still this. If you pay the Barista more money, the coffee he/she serves you goes up, otherwise profits reduce
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
How long ago was it when Scott was pasting predictions of mass unemployment ?
Why is there unemployment and a huge labour shortage at the same time, what are the lazy barstewards lounging on the dole living it up not forced at gunpoint to get their arse's out the door and do a day's work.
I appreciate this is a wind-up but have you ever tried 'living it up' on UC?
I found this rather enjoyable to write, and if you happen to be thinking of reading about the Second Punic War, which is an eminently wise thought to have, the blog may be of some use.
Wee Jimmy comes across as a good politician, but that isn't a compliment. Poor old Alex, he fell foul of her ambition. Not that I have much sympathy for him.
In the end, you have to trust politicians but not hero-worship them. They are mostly in it for their own good, or they have a fanatical desire to make the world a better place by doing down others, Neither are healthy.
Nicola Sturgeon first got into politics to get rid of Trident. Independence for her was initially a means to that end. I think that shows a profound desire to make the world a better place for others. I don’t hero worship her. I don’t hero worship anyone. Heroes are for pre-pubescent children and TeamGB rampers.
She is in it for herself and nothing else, what have her and her missing partner done with all the cash they conned out of people. She has survived all the crookery around Salmond etc but GRA will be her undoing for sure. Surrounded herself with useless lying sheep and woke nutjobs, she is wrecking the country.
If Raab goes, perhaps Johnson will take on the brief and double up as both PM and foreign secretary. Who can doubt his dedication to hard work and service to others?
Too busy doing fantastically well double-jobbing as minister for the Union.
I was choosing lampshades yesterday and arranging flowers in vases and plumping cushions and knitting and other housewifely tasks. The sorts of things that I'm sure you imagine me doing all the time. In the evening there was a visit from a steam train - all beautifully polished up - with the lucky travellers inside drinking their Prosecco while us yokels stared and waved. All very Railway Children-esque and there was certainly enough steam around to make the reappearance of long lost fathers seem almost possible.
I trust all was sweetness and light on here, yes?
Meanwhile Kabul airport has turned into a mixture of Hillsborough and Sophie's Choice. Horrible.
Still, the sun is out today - which makes a nice change as yesterday the rain was atrocious. The Tahiti lime tree still needs planting as did not fancy doing it while trying to avoid drowning.
There is a prison nearby, mostly full of sex offenders and paedophiles. They have a prison shop and sell plants which they grow. I did mention to Daughter the idea mooted by others of having prisoners work in her pub but the look she gave me .....
Anyway, if you want a good documentary about another British fuck-up as they leave a country they should never have invaded (ooh, a bit of controversy!) The Road to Partition - only 2 episodes - is on BBC iPlayer and is very good.
Sounds pretty good on the home front!
I've often been struck by the consistent pattern of the failure of partition as we dismantled the Empire. It led directly to permanent strife in all of India, Israel, Cyprus and Ireland. A similar process without much British involvement happened in Yugoslavia, and arguably Ukraine is another example. That's not to say that unitary solutions always work well, but trying to settle rival groups into adjoining nations seems to be a recipe for catastrophe, fuelling the rise of aggressive nationalism and open warfare.
What was interesting to me was that Lloyd George's attempts at resolution were all predicated on the assumptions that lay behind Home Rule and ignored the rise of Sinn Fein after WW1. He was answering questions posed in 1912 not in 1921. That and the nervousness which James Craig on the Unionist side had about Britain betraying the Unionists. No love lost there.
In the end the British did what they often do - got enough of a solution to make it look as if they'd solved the problem, walked away, caused lots of problems elsewhere and left the real issues for subsequent generations to grapple with.
In Ireland partition was probably inevitable given the plantation of Scots and others in Ulster from the 17th C onwards. The solution to one problem then leading to a yet bigger one two centuries later, the solution to that leading to another bloody one 40 years later and so on and on. Quite what the current temporary solution will lead to who knows. But kicking difficult issues into the long grass is not just the preserve of British governments.
Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone both had Catholic majorities at the 1911 Census (56% and 55%), and Nationalist majorities at the 1918 election (54% and 55%). Yet they were included in Northern Ireland!
I think the original original plan was to include the whole of Ulster in NI, but Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan managed to opt out (I think i read somewhere).
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
I'm loving your inflation is good narrative. First it was supply/ demand inflation will reduce the deficit, now wage-price spiral inflation saves the economy.
I think I can throw my 1980s A Level Economics textbook in the bin.
Of course you can throw your 1980s textbook into the bin, much has changed in the past 40 years.
How does your 1980s textbook deal with deflation? Or quantitative easing? Etc
I never said we should have wage-price spiral inflation. Having real pay rises doesn't mean a wage-price spiral, indeed kind of by definition it doesn't since if there is such a spiral then the pay rise isn't real.
What mysticism is this of which you speak?
The rules are still this. If you pay the Barista more money, the coffee he/she serves you goes up, otherwise profits reduce
That's not the rules. There's this thing called productivity.
If you pay the Barista more money, maybe the business invests in a better coffee machine that can produce more coffee per hour or replaces the Barista by an automated machine, and the labour cost element of the coffee goes down.
As we improve productivity real terms pay rises become viable. It's the only thing that makes them viable.
Just catching up having been away. A couple of comments if I may:
1. Lovely to see so many Tories campaigning so vigorously for significant rises in working people's wages to counter the alleged labour shortage. Something at last that the lefties on here can agree with the Tories about. Strange old world, isn't it? 2. I'd have thought the more radical Tory solution would be to lock more people up. I read on here that prisoners are much sought after. If you imprison a lot more people, then release them early, wouldn't that be a more cost effective solution to labour shortages?
I don't see any tories apart from DavidL saying pay rises for minimum wage folk is a good thing. I am not a tory neither I believe is another richard
If not a Tory what would you describe yourself and 'another richard' as being?
Wouldn't a Tory be a member or otherwise strong supporter of the Conservative party ?
Something which Hyufd and a few other PBers - Casino, Mortimer, MM, Max - might be classed as.
But which neither I nor to my knowledge Pagan2 are.
Can we clear this up once and for all. Being 'A Tory' is not an ethnicity it is simply a voting intention. I can understand why you're in denial-particularly at the moment - but to suggest neither you nor 'Another Richard' would vote for anyone else (except perhaps UKIP) is plainly ridiculous.
So time to man up and say 'I'm a Tory and I'm proud"
Proud to be a greedy , grasping , lying two bit chiseller who would sell out their granny , not for me.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
We have far too many jobs that are done by very cheap labour because it is not worth investing in machinery that could significantly improve productivity. Your Anglian food factory is almost certainly a good example of this. The result is a low wage, low productivity economy where too many people rely upon the State to top up inadequate incomes with in work benefits making them net recipients from the system.
We need to change the balance on this. Not over night but certainly over time. An 8% increase in wages this year driven by the lower paid would certainly be a step in the right direction. The test will be whether the NMW continues to absorb more and more of our workforce or whether those with basic skills, such as being able to drive, can do better. If we can we will create a more cohesive, fairer society. I would have expected you to be in favour of this.
The way you say it, we have basically reverted to the mid-C19 Speenhamland System of using poor law to subsidise the farmers and big landowners in their payment of starvation wages to their workers, at the expense of the taxpayers more generally. Or am I missing something?
That's Tories for you , they look after their chums
Michael Gove is a rare resource in modern politics. He thinks about things and he is willing to act on his thoughts to change things in ways that he think are better. This used to be, well maybe not quite the norm, but pretty common. People went into politics because they didn't like the way things were done and wanted to change it. It's what motivated them to put up with all the crap.
Now almost all of our politicians seem to be in politics for ego reasons. They view their role as managerial and tactical: what is going to look good, what makes my opponents make bad, what's going to advance my career? It makes our politicians superficial, intellectually lazy, vacuous and pretty unprincipled.
Of course Gove has an ego too, an enormous one, and not all of the changes he wants to make will meet general approval, but he gets things done and gives the government a purpose. Since his role in Brexit wound down he has been somewhat under utilised. I suggested when that happened where Boris put Gove next would give a good clue about his priorities. So far these remain well disguised if they exist at all.
Is the FO really the place for Gove? I would think not. Its not a major role these days given so much international stuff is done at PM level. The FO could certainly do with a serious shake up but its hardly a priority. And then there is the flying thing. I would really like to see him at the Home Office, but then I'd rather see almost anyone than Patel at the Home Office.
David, you have lost the lot, the only place for that odious unprincipled little creep is the bin. He perfectly reflects what is the rotten core of the current Tories though.
If I have lost the lot Malcolm, is that because you are taking the "p"? 😉
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
I'm loving your inflation is good narrative. First it was supply/ demand inflation will reduce the deficit, now wage-price spiral inflation saves the economy.
I think I can throw my 1980s A Level Economics textbook in the bin.
Of course you can throw your 1980s textbook into the bin, much has changed in the past 40 years.
How does your 1980s textbook deal with deflation? Or quantitative easing? Etc
I never said we should have wage-price spiral inflation. Having real pay rises doesn't mean a wage-price spiral, indeed kind of by definition it doesn't since if there is such a spiral then the pay rise isn't real.
What mysticism is this of which you speak?
The rules are still this. If you pay the Barista more money, the coffee he/she serves you goes up, otherwise profits reduce
That's not the rules. There's this thing called productivity.
If you pay the Barista more money, maybe the business invests in a better coffee machine that can produce more coffee per hour or replaces the Barista by an automated machine, and the labour cost element of the coffee goes down.
As we improve productivity real terms pay rises become viable. It's the only thing that makes them viable.
I suppose when it got more expensive to send kids up chimnies.....
The system of dispersing asylum seekers across the country is uneven, with some areas accommodating far more than others - and 32% of local authorities not taking any at all, according to a House of Commons library report.
Areas with lower than average household income have tended to accept more asylum seekers - the North East of England has the highest number per 1,000 resident population - 17 times greater than the South-East.
Mr. Dickson, I do not trust the Government or the Opposition with that sort of nonsense over here.
Fair point. If you are referring to the Westminster government. I would trust the Scottish one.
I would not trust the current crooks running Scottish government any more than I trust Tories. Both lying cheating stealing no marks.
Sadly my response would be that of course they are - they are politicians.
I have genuine admiration for the fact that you are able to separate the cause of independence from many of those who are advocating it but who are not to be admired. Sadly I think that right now Sturgeon is probably the best chance Scotland has of getting that independence but - a la Churchill after WW2 - I hope that once that is achieved the Scots have the good sense to dump Sturgeon and her cabal for some politicians who are not quite so mired in the cesspool.
The system of dispersing asylum seekers across the country is uneven, with some areas accommodating far more than others - and 32% of local authorities not taking any at all, according to a House of Commons library report.
Areas with lower than average household income have tended to accept more asylum seekers - the North East of England has the highest number per 1,000 resident population - 17 times greater than the South-East.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
How long ago was it when Scott was pasting predictions of mass unemployment ?
Why is there unemployment and a huge labour shortage at the same time, what are the lazy barstewards lounging on the dole living it up not forced at gunpoint to get their arse's out the door and do a day's work.
The unemployed don't live where the jobs are. A gun up the arse was the IDS approach. I remember him in the Welsh valleys and sneering at the unemployed there - jobs in Cardiff he said. Yes. shift work like in pubs and restaurants. With the people out of work having kids and reliant on public transport...
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
I was choosing lampshades yesterday and arranging flowers in vases and plumping cushions and knitting and other housewifely tasks. The sorts of things that I'm sure you imagine me doing all the time. In the evening there was a visit from a steam train - all beautifully polished up - with the lucky travellers inside drinking their Prosecco while us yokels stared and waved. All very Railway Children-esque and there was certainly enough steam around to make the reappearance of long lost fathers seem almost possible.
I trust all was sweetness and light on here, yes?
Meanwhile Kabul airport has turned into a mixture of Hillsborough and Sophie's Choice. Horrible.
Still, the sun is out today - which makes a nice change as yesterday the rain was atrocious. The Tahiti lime tree still needs planting as did not fancy doing it while trying to avoid drowning.
There is a prison nearby, mostly full of sex offenders and paedophiles. They have a prison shop and sell plants which they grow. I did mention to Daughter the idea mooted by others of having prisoners work in her pub but the look she gave me .....
Anyway, if you want a good documentary about another British fuck-up as they leave a country they should never have invaded (ooh, a bit of controversy!) The Road to Partition - only 2 episodes - is on BBC iPlayer and is very good.
Sounds pretty good on the home front!
I've often been struck by the consistent pattern of the failure of partition as we dismantled the Empire. It led directly to permanent strife in all of India, Israel, Cyprus and Ireland. A similar process without much British involvement happened in Yugoslavia, and arguably Ukraine is another example. That's not to say that unitary solutions always work well, but trying to settle rival groups into adjoining nations seems to be a recipe for catastrophe, fuelling the rise of aggressive nationalism and open warfare.
What was interesting to me was that Lloyd George's attempts at resolution were all predicated on the assumptions that lay behind Home Rule and ignored the rise of Sinn Fein after WW1. He was answering questions posed in 1912 not in 1921. That and the nervousness which James Craig on the Unionist side had about Britain betraying the Unionists. No love lost there.
In the end the British did what they often do - got enough of a solution to make it look as if they'd solved the problem, walked away, caused lots of problems elsewhere and left the real issues for subsequent generations to grapple with.
In Ireland partition was probably inevitable given the plantation of Scots and others in Ulster from the 17th C onwards. The solution to one problem then leading to a yet bigger one two centuries later, the solution to that leading to another bloody one 40 years later and so on and on. Quite what the current temporary solution will lead to who knows. But kicking difficult issues into the long grass is not just the preserve of British governments.
Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone both had Catholic majorities at the 1911 Census (56% and 55%), and Nationalist majorities at the 1918 election (54% and 55%). Yet they were included in Northern Ireland!
I think the original original plan was to include the whole of Ulster in NI, but Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan managed to opt out (I think i read somewhere).
A quick look at the relevant Wikipedia pages suggest that at some point all sides said, in effect, 'sod it, that's the border' and left Fermanagh, Tyrone and Derry City on the Norn side. There's had been a Boundary Commission with some minor amendments, but that, too, was 'forgotten about'. To be fair, in the 1918 election Fermanagh was won by the Unionists.
Edit Proof-reading and correction of 'auto-correct'.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
How long ago was it when Scott was pasting predictions of mass unemployment ?
Why is there unemployment and a huge labour shortage at the same time, what are the lazy barstewards lounging on the dole living it up not forced at gunpoint to get their arse's out the door and do a day's work.
I appreciate this is a wind-up but have you ever tried 'living it up' on UC?
Of course not , I have worked all my life. You rightly point out it is a wind up but it does have a serious point to it. In any proper functioning country it should be impossible to have so many unemployed people whilst at same time having a huge labour shortage. It shows how badly the country is run , how poor government agencies are and is a scandal. It does not impact the Tories and as long as they are all well paid and living it up , they do not give a hoot. Labour are only a hair's breadth different nowadays so it is a case of the devil or the deep blue sea.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
I'm loving your inflation is good narrative. First it was supply/ demand inflation will reduce the deficit, now wage-price spiral inflation saves the economy.
I think I can throw my 1980s A Level Economics textbook in the bin.
Of course you can throw your 1980s textbook into the bin, much has changed in the past 40 years.
How does your 1980s textbook deal with deflation? Or quantitative easing? Etc
I never said we should have wage-price spiral inflation. Having real pay rises doesn't mean a wage-price spiral, indeed kind of by definition it doesn't since if there is such a spiral then the pay rise isn't real.
What mysticism is this of which you speak?
The rules are still this. If you pay the Barista more money, the coffee he/she serves you goes up, otherwise profits reduce
That's not the rules. There's this thing called productivity.
If you pay the Barista more money, maybe the business invests in a better coffee machine that can produce more coffee per hour or replaces the Barista by an automated machine, and the labour cost element of the coffee goes down.
As we improve productivity real terms pay rises become viable. It's the only thing that makes them viable.
Till you get to the point that no-one has the money to buy your coffee and then even the grasping Tories are in trouble
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
I'm loving your inflation is good narrative. First it was supply/ demand inflation will reduce the deficit, now wage-price spiral inflation saves the economy.
I think I can throw my 1980s A Level Economics textbook in the bin.
Of course you can throw your 1980s textbook into the bin, much has changed in the past 40 years.
How does your 1980s textbook deal with deflation? Or quantitative easing? Etc
I never said we should have wage-price spiral inflation. Having real pay rises doesn't mean a wage-price spiral, indeed kind of by definition it doesn't since if there is such a spiral then the pay rise isn't real.
What mysticism is this of which you speak?
The rules are still this. If you pay the Barista more money, the coffee he/she serves you goes up, otherwise profits reduce
The 80s economics textbook is still relevant, Starbucks profits reducing slightly isn't the end of civilisation and if its at the expense of workers pay is probably positive for society.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
I was choosing lampshades yesterday and arranging flowers in vases and plumping cushions and knitting and other housewifely tasks. The sorts of things that I'm sure you imagine me doing all the time. In the evening there was a visit from a steam train - all beautifully polished up - with the lucky travellers inside drinking their Prosecco while us yokels stared and waved. All very Railway Children-esque and there was certainly enough steam around to make the reappearance of long lost fathers seem almost possible.
I trust all was sweetness and light on here, yes?
Meanwhile Kabul airport has turned into a mixture of Hillsborough and Sophie's Choice. Horrible.
Still, the sun is out today - which makes a nice change as yesterday the rain was atrocious. The Tahiti lime tree still needs planting as did not fancy doing it while trying to avoid drowning.
There is a prison nearby, mostly full of sex offenders and paedophiles. They have a prison shop and sell plants which they grow. I did mention to Daughter the idea mooted by others of having prisoners work in her pub but the look she gave me .....
Anyway, if you want a good documentary about another British fuck-up as they leave a country they should never have invaded (ooh, a bit of controversy!) The Road to Partition - only 2 episodes - is on BBC iPlayer and is very good.
Sounds pretty good on the home front!
I've often been struck by the consistent pattern of the failure of partition as we dismantled the Empire. It led directly to permanent strife in all of India, Israel, Cyprus and Ireland. A similar process without much British involvement happened in Yugoslavia, and arguably Ukraine is another example. That's not to say that unitary solutions always work well, but trying to settle rival groups into adjoining nations seems to be a recipe for catastrophe, fuelling the rise of aggressive nationalism and open warfare.
What was interesting to me was that Lloyd George's attempts at resolution were all predicated on the assumptions that lay behind Home Rule and ignored the rise of Sinn Fein after WW1. He was answering questions posed in 1912 not in 1921. That and the nervousness which James Craig on the Unionist side had about Britain betraying the Unionists. No love lost there.
In the end the British did what they often do - got enough of a solution to make it look as if they'd solved the problem, walked away, caused lots of problems elsewhere and left the real issues for subsequent generations to grapple with.
In Ireland partition was probably inevitable given the plantation of Scots and others in Ulster from the 17th C onwards. The solution to one problem then leading to a yet bigger one two centuries later, the solution to that leading to another bloody one 40 years later and so on and on. Quite what the current temporary solution will lead to who knows. But kicking difficult issues into the long grass is not just the preserve of British governments.
Though interestingly, the Brexit agreement has driven much greater trade across the Irish border. Reunification defacto is on its way, if not yet dejure.
Just catching up having been away. A couple of comments if I may:
1. Lovely to see so many Tories campaigning so vigorously for significant rises in working people's wages to counter the alleged labour shortage. Something at last that the lefties on here can agree with the Tories about. Strange old world, isn't it? 2. I'd have thought the more radical Tory solution would be to lock more people up. I read on here that prisoners are much sought after. If you imprison a lot more people, then release them early, wouldn't that be a more cost effective solution to labour shortages?
I don't see any tories apart from DavidL saying pay rises for minimum wage folk is a good thing. I am not a tory neither I believe is another richard
If not a Tory what would you describe yourself and 'another richard' as being?
Wouldn't a Tory be a member or otherwise strong supporter of the Conservative party ?
Something which Hyufd and a few other PBers - Casino, Mortimer, MM, Max - might be classed as.
But which neither I nor to my knowledge Pagan2 are.
Can we clear this up once and for all. Being 'A Tory' is not an ethnicity it is simply a voting intention. I can understand why you're in denial-particularly at the moment - but to suggest neither you nor 'Another Richard' would vote for anyone else (except perhaps UKIP) is plainly ridiculous.
So time to man up and say 'I'm a Tory and I'm proud"
Exactly so, Roger. All the dissembling that goes on around this. It's as if being a Tory is something shameful. Why would anyone feel that? Beats me.
"I'm not a member. I've voted for different parties over the years. It was about Brexit. You're forgetting the choice. It was that or Corbyn."
Bla bla bla. None of this is relevant. It's interesting but it's off the point. If you voted Tory in the last general election YOU ARE A TORY and this state persists until rectified by a sincere and firm intention to vote otherwise in the next one.
I was choosing lampshades yesterday and arranging flowers in vases and plumping cushions and knitting and other housewifely tasks. The sorts of things that I'm sure you imagine me doing all the time. In the evening there was a visit from a steam train - all beautifully polished up - with the lucky travellers inside drinking their Prosecco while us yokels stared and waved. All very Railway Children-esque and there was certainly enough steam around to make the reappearance of long lost fathers seem almost possible.
I trust all was sweetness and light on here, yes?
Meanwhile Kabul airport has turned into a mixture of Hillsborough and Sophie's Choice. Horrible.
Still, the sun is out today - which makes a nice change as yesterday the rain was atrocious. The Tahiti lime tree still needs planting as did not fancy doing it while trying to avoid drowning.
There is a prison nearby, mostly full of sex offenders and paedophiles. They have a prison shop and sell plants which they grow. I did mention to Daughter the idea mooted by others of having prisoners work in her pub but the look she gave me .....
Anyway, if you want a good documentary about another British fuck-up as they leave a country they should never have invaded (ooh, a bit of controversy!) The Road to Partition - only 2 episodes - is on BBC iPlayer and is very good.
Sounds pretty good on the home front!
I've often been struck by the consistent pattern of the failure of partition as we dismantled the Empire. It led directly to permanent strife in all of India, Israel, Cyprus and Ireland. A similar process without much British involvement happened in Yugoslavia, and arguably Ukraine is another example. That's not to say that unitary solutions always work well, but trying to settle rival groups into adjoining nations seems to be a recipe for catastrophe, fuelling the rise of aggressive nationalism and open warfare.
What was interesting to me was that Lloyd George's attempts at resolution were all predicated on the assumptions that lay behind Home Rule and ignored the rise of Sinn Fein after WW1. He was answering questions posed in 1912 not in 1921. That and the nervousness which James Craig on the Unionist side had about Britain betraying the Unionists. No love lost there.
In the end the British did what they often do - got enough of a solution to make it look as if they'd solved the problem, walked away, caused lots of problems elsewhere and left the real issues for subsequent generations to grapple with.
In Ireland partition was probably inevitable given the plantation of Scots and others in Ulster from the 17th C onwards. The solution to one problem then leading to a yet bigger one two centuries later, the solution to that leading to another bloody one 40 years later and so on and on. Quite what the current temporary solution will lead to who knows. But kicking difficult issues into the long grass is not just the preserve of British governments.
Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone both had Catholic majorities at the 1911 Census (56% and 55%), and Nationalist majorities at the 1918 election (54% and 55%). Yet they were included in Northern Ireland!
I think the original original plan was to include the whole of Ulster in NI, but Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan managed to opt out (I think i read somewhere).
"Peace through Ordeal" by Frank Pakenham is, I still believe, the best book on the whole process of partition and the negotiations that led to it. My only quibble - like Tim Pat Coogan who wrote the introduction to the updated version - would be that Pakenham is too favourable to de Valera who personally I believe to have ben an absolute shit.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
How long ago was it when Scott was pasting predictions of mass unemployment ?
Why is there unemployment and a huge labour shortage at the same time, what are the lazy barstewards lounging on the dole living it up not forced at gunpoint to get their arse's out the door and do a day's work.
I appreciate this is a wind-up but have you ever tried 'living it up' on UC?
Of course not , I have worked all my life. You rightly point out it is a wind up but it does have a serious point to it. In any proper functioning country it should be impossible to have so many unemployed people whilst at same time having a huge labour shortage. It shows how badly the country is run , how poor government agencies are and is a scandal. It does not impact the Tories and as long as they are all well paid and living it up , they do not give a hoot. Labour are only a hair's breadth different nowadays so it is a case of the devil or the deep blue sea.
The jobs are not where the unemployed are. We can either try to relocate the unemployed, or try to relocate the jobs.
If Raab goes, perhaps Johnson will take on the brief and double up as both PM and foreign secretary. Who can doubt his dedication to hard work and service to others?
Is he allowed to take both salaries?
He could take on about 8 Cabinet roles, takes the salaries - and keep Carrie in Downing Street in the style to which she wants be accustomed! Sorted....
Cannabis use fuelling rise in psychosis among young adults, says top Priory expert A leading addictions expert based at the Priory’s Hospital in south London has issued a strong warning about the use of cannabis by young adults, and its link with paranoid psychosis.
His comments came as figures show cannabis has caused more than 125,000 NHS hospital admissions in the last five years.
And around 15,000 of those cases involved teenagers – some of whom were rushed to A&E departments suffering serious psychosis.
Modern cannabis is really scary stuff. Paranoid psychosis is not a desirable state of mind to be in.
My poor, mad brother’s 30 years of destroyed life started with a cannabis-induced psychotic episode while he shared a flat with a dope dealer with access to large amounts of the ‘strong stuff’ which was thought to be a great thing back then. Having experienced a couple of whiteys after smoking joints smeared in cannabis oil myself, I’d say that sort of thing wasn’t far of modern day skunk.
People who rail against legalisation & regulation of the cannabis trade seem to me like those who thought Prohibition was great because it kept people away from 160 proof spirit laced with antifreeze.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
The answer surely is internal migration, though agricultural wages would have to notably improve to cause folk to move from deprived areas with their families.
In reality, I suspect that we will just import a lot of goods rather than a lot of workers.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Wee Jimmy comes across as a good politician, but that isn't a compliment. Poor old Alex, he fell foul of her ambition. Not that I have much sympathy for him.
In the end, you have to trust politicians but not hero-worship them. They are mostly in it for their own good, or they have a fanatical desire to make the world a better place by doing down others, Neither are healthy.
Nicola Sturgeon first got into politics to get rid of Trident. Independence for her was initially a means to that end. I think that shows a profound desire to make the world a better place for others. I don’t hero worship her. I don’t hero worship anyone. Heroes are for pre-pubescent children and TeamGB rampers.
Heroes are those who run towards disaster while others run away
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?
My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.
So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
I'm loving your inflation is good narrative. First it was supply/ demand inflation will reduce the deficit, now wage-price spiral inflation saves the economy.
I think I can throw my 1980s A Level Economics textbook in the bin.
Of course you can throw your 1980s textbook into the bin, much has changed in the past 40 years.
How does your 1980s textbook deal with deflation? Or quantitative easing? Etc
I never said we should have wage-price spiral inflation. Having real pay rises doesn't mean a wage-price spiral, indeed kind of by definition it doesn't since if there is such a spiral then the pay rise isn't real.
What mysticism is this of which you speak?
The rules are still this. If you pay the Barista more money, the coffee he/she serves you goes up, otherwise profits reduce
That's not the rules. There's this thing called productivity.
If you pay the Barista more money, maybe the business invests in a better coffee machine that can produce more coffee per hour or replaces the Barista by an automated machine, and the labour cost element of the coffee goes down.
As we improve productivity real terms pay rises become viable. It's the only thing that makes them viable.
And there's the problem.
There are some jobs where it's possible to get big gains in productivity. Great, innovation and productivity, getting more value for less input are good things.
But there are other jobs where it's hard to squeeze out more productivity and, if we're honest, it's hard to see where the extra productivity could be squeezed out. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but sadly she is sometimes childless.
Take your barista example. Sure, you can give them a bigger or faster machine. But the other parts of the job- taking the orders, collecting the money, keeping the cafe looking nice, flirting with the customers... that's much harder to automate. And that's mostly what we are after when we go to a cafe or a restaurant.
Or lorry driving. There were gains made when computers got efficient at route planning, but the big picture is a driver with a container and unless you are planning on making the container bigger, the productivity gains aren't huge.
Or social care. There's an irreducible core to the job- a carer and someone in need. There are probably gains around the edges, but not much at a fundamental level.
The spottiness of productivity gains- some areas become massively more productive while the nature of others means that productivity gains are slower to negligible- is one of the things that a strong free-market model struggles with. Part of the answer is that we should all value some things more then we do, but that leads to the counterintuitive result that people in less productive fields should also see their incomes rise alongside those in more productive areas.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
How long ago was it when Scott was pasting predictions of mass unemployment ?
Why is there unemployment and a huge labour shortage at the same time, what are the lazy barstewards lounging on the dole living it up not forced at gunpoint to get their arse's out the door and do a day's work.
I appreciate this is a wind-up but have you ever tried 'living it up' on UC?
Of course not , I have worked all my life. You rightly point out it is a wind up but it does have a serious point to it. In any proper functioning country it should be impossible to have so many unemployed people whilst at same time having a huge labour shortage. It shows how badly the country is run , how poor government agencies are and is a scandal. It does not impact the Tories and as long as they are all well paid and living it up , they do not give a hoot. Labour are only a hair's breadth different nowadays so it is a case of the devil or the deep blue sea.
The jobs are not where the unemployed are. We can either try to relocate the unemployed, or try to relocate the jobs.
And the invisible hand of the market can do that.
If as you suggest in the future there's an abundance of domestic agriculture needing processing and a shortage of processing plants then the processing plants will be in high demand/low supply.
So they can increase prices, increasing profits, some of which can go to higher wages. Higher wages will attract more staff.
Higher prices will attract more investors into the sector increasing supply.
And lo and behold the problem is solved. Economics 101. We don't need central planning or Luddism to protect every unproductive job.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
I agree with some of your points but the reason the food processing plants are in Wisbech rather than Widnes is because that is where the fields are. You grow crops where the soil and climate conditions are most favourable and then you process as close to there as possible.
But I agree that people should move for work. It has always been the way - people forget the mining communities that moved wholesale from places like Durham to south Wales in the early 20th century. Indeed my father moved from Essex to Liverpool to Nottingham and finally to Newark in the first 4 years of my life because those places were where the work was at the time.
Mr. Dickson, I do not trust the Government or the Opposition with that sort of nonsense over here.
Fair point. If you are referring to the Westminster government. I would trust the Scottish one.
I would not trust the current crooks running Scottish government any more than I trust Tories. Both lying cheating stealing no marks.
Sadly my response would be that of course they are - they are politicians.
I have genuine admiration for the fact that you are able to separate the cause of independence from many of those who are advocating it but who are not to be admired. Sadly I think that right now Sturgeon is probably the best chance Scotland has of getting that independence but - a la Churchill after WW2 - I hope that once that is achieved the Scots have the good sense to dump Sturgeon and her cabal for some politicians who are not quite so mired in the cesspool.
But that is part of the point - to be able to dump those ruling Scotland should we so wish. We can't dump Mr Johnson and his crew.
Mr. Dickson, I do not trust the Government or the Opposition with that sort of nonsense over here.
Fair point. If you are referring to the Westminster government. I would trust the Scottish one.
I would not trust the current crooks running Scottish government any more than I trust Tories. Both lying cheating stealing no marks.
Sadly my response would be that of course they are - they are politicians.
I have genuine admiration for the fact that you are able to separate the cause of independence from many of those who are advocating it but who are not to be admired. Sadly I think that right now Sturgeon is probably the best chance Scotland has of getting that independence but - a la Churchill after WW2 - I hope that once that is achieved the Scots have the good sense to dump Sturgeon and her cabal for some politicians who are not quite so mired in the cesspool.
But that is part of the point - to be able to dump those ruling Scotland should we so wish. We can't dump Mr Johnson and his crew.
I thought I was obviously agreeing with you in what I wrote. I am in favour of Scottish Independence for entirely positive reasons. One of those would be the ability to dump people like Sturgeon and Johnson. But right now I think Sturgeon is a necessary evil for Scottish independence.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
How long ago was it when Scott was pasting predictions of mass unemployment ?
Why is there unemployment and a huge labour shortage at the same time, what are the lazy barstewards lounging on the dole living it up not forced at gunpoint to get their arse's out the door and do a day's work.
I appreciate this is a wind-up but have you ever tried 'living it up' on UC?
Of course not , I have worked all my life. You rightly point out it is a wind up but it does have a serious point to it. In any proper functioning country it should be impossible to have so many unemployed people whilst at same time having a huge labour shortage. It shows how badly the country is run , how poor government agencies are and is a scandal. It does not impact the Tories and as long as they are all well paid and living it up , they do not give a hoot. Labour are only a hair's breadth different nowadays so it is a case of the devil or the deep blue sea.
Yeah, I spent 18 months 'living it up' on the dole back in the 80s after breaking my back. It all came to a sad end when I was trained in IT and left for forge a career all on my tod.
Of course I ended up paying back my dole 100s of times over in taxes but I'll be forever grateful for that safety net.
These days, now retired, I do a day a week for Citizens Advice; I've yet to come across anyone on the dole who wants to be there or is 'living it up'.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?
My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.
So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
150 or so years ago, I believe, people moved from Norfolk to the NE because mining paid better than agricultural work. Same reason that many (not all..... one amazing exception) of my paternal ancestors moved from SW Wales to The Valleys.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
I'm loving your inflation is good narrative. First it was supply/ demand inflation will reduce the deficit, now wage-price spiral inflation saves the economy.
I think I can throw my 1980s A Level Economics textbook in the bin.
Of course you can throw your 1980s textbook into the bin, much has changed in the past 40 years.
How does your 1980s textbook deal with deflation? Or quantitative easing? Etc
I never said we should have wage-price spiral inflation. Having real pay rises doesn't mean a wage-price spiral, indeed kind of by definition it doesn't since if there is such a spiral then the pay rise isn't real.
What mysticism is this of which you speak?
The rules are still this. If you pay the Barista more money, the coffee he/she serves you goes up, otherwise profits reduce
The 80s economics textbook is still relevant, Starbucks profits reducing slightly isn't the end of civilisation and if its at the expense of workers pay is probably positive for society.
That would in effect be a transfer of earnings from the owners of capital to the providers of labour, roughly from the old and rich to the young and poor.
A more equitable distribution of pay within organisations would be no bad thing either.
The system of dispersing asylum seekers across the country is uneven, with some areas accommodating far more than others - and 32% of local authorities not taking any at all, according to a House of Commons library report.
Areas with lower than average household income have tended to accept more asylum seekers - the North East of England has the highest number per 1,000 resident population - 17 times greater than the South-East.
There's a link to details of asylum seekers per local authority.
Couldn't help noticing that Tom Tugendhat's Tonbridge has none and neither does Nick Palmer's Waverley.
Yep. Tory councils don't take any asylum seekers. Fancy that.
Former Afghan interpreters might have a better shot because of their fluency in English, but otherwise, why would an asylum seeker feel any affinity with a place in non-urban Britain where they have no connection whatsoever with their own community? Half a dozen sad and lonely Iraqis in Ilminster or Afghans in Ashby de la Zouch are going to put extra demands on those places in meeting their needs - whilst requiring interpreters to do so.
There is a good reason for the lack of geographic dispersal: they are neither wanted - nor want to be there.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
We have far too many jobs that are done by very cheap labour because it is not worth investing in machinery that could significantly improve productivity. Your Anglian food factory is almost certainly a good example of this. The result is a low wage, low productivity economy where too many people rely upon the State to top up inadequate incomes with in work benefits making them net recipients from the system.
We need to change the balance on this. Not over night but certainly over time. An 8% increase in wages this year driven by the lower paid would certainly be a step in the right direction. The test will be whether the NMW continues to absorb more and more of our workforce or whether those with basic skills, such as being able to drive, can do better. If we can we will create a more cohesive, fairer society. I would have expected you to be in favour of this.
The way you say it, we have basically reverted to the mid-C19 Speenhamland System of using poor law to subsidise the farmers and big landowners in their payment of starvation wages to their workers, at the expense of the taxpayers more generally. Or am I missing something?
That's Tories for you , they look after their chums
What still puzzles me is that the Brexiter farmers didn't add 2 + 2 together when it came to their staffing policies. But who am I to Remainsplain them?
Morning, Malky! Had a foggy morning over here and still cloudy with small showers around. Hope it's brighter over your way - been enough rain of late.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?
My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.
So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
So your answer seems to be to import cheap foreign labour to live in squalid conditions in Wisbech so that Wizzy Food Co can maintain its profit margins?
I mean personally I am all in favour of migration and people being able to move where they want for whatever reason but your argument is actually utterly illogical. So long as the factory is in Wisbech (which funnily enough I drove past last night coming back from a wedding) then the food manufacturers must pay enough for the workers to be able to afford to live there whether those workers are from Widnes or Wroclaw. The days of expecting people to work for less than a living wage should be behind us.
Just catching up having been away. A couple of comments if I may:
1. Lovely to see so many Tories campaigning so vigorously for significant rises in working people's wages to counter the alleged labour shortage. Something at last that the lefties on here can agree with the Tories about. Strange old world, isn't it? 2. I'd have thought the more radical Tory solution would be to lock more people up. I read on here that prisoners are much sought after. If you imprison a lot more people, then release them early, wouldn't that be a more cost effective solution to labour shortages?
I don't see any tories apart from DavidL saying pay rises for minimum wage folk is a good thing. I am not a tory neither I believe is another richard
If not a Tory what would you describe yourself and 'another richard' as being?
Wouldn't a Tory be a member or otherwise strong supporter of the Conservative party ?
Something which Hyufd and a few other PBers - Casino, Mortimer, MM, Max - might be classed as.
But which neither I nor to my knowledge Pagan2 are.
Can we clear this up once and for all. Being 'A Tory' is not an ethnicity it is simply a voting intention. I can understand why you're in denial-particularly at the moment - but to suggest neither you nor 'Another Richard' would vote for anyone else (except perhaps UKIP) is plainly ridiculous.
So time to man up and say 'I'm a Tory and I'm proud"
Exactly so, Roger. All the dissembling that goes on around this. It's as if being a Tory is something shameful. Why would anyone feel that? Beats me.
"I'm not a member. I've voted for different parties over the years. It was about Brexit. You're forgetting the choice. It was that or Corbyn."
Bla bla bla. None of this is relevant. It's interesting but it's off the point. If you voted Tory in the last general election YOU ARE A TORY and this state persists until rectified by a sincereaf and firm intention to vote otherwise in the next one.
But to be a PB Tory is a sinuous and quicksilver thing, hard to pin down.
Afaics the people who voted for Cameron and now despise him are the same people who voted for May and now despise her, and also the the same people who voted for BJ but are still defending his every ineptitude and moral failing.
The one consistency seems to be that they bear no responsibility for any of the consequences of voting for these fine folk.
The system of dispersing asylum seekers across the country is uneven, with some areas accommodating far more than others - and 32% of local authorities not taking any at all, according to a House of Commons library report.
Areas with lower than average household income have tended to accept more asylum seekers - the North East of England has the highest number per 1,000 resident population - 17 times greater than the South-East.
There's a link to details of asylum seekers per local authority.
Couldn't help noticing that Tom Tugendhat's Tonbridge has none and neither does Nick Palmer's Waverley.
Yep. Tory councils don't take any asylum seekers. Fancy that.
Former Afghan interpreters might have a better shot because of their fluency in English, but otherwise, why would an asylum seeker feel any affinity with a place in non-urban Britain where they have no connection whatsoever with their own community? Half a dozen sad and lonely Iraqis in Ilminster or Afghans in Ashby de la Zouch are going to put extra demands on those places in meeting their needs - whilst requiring interpreters to do so.
There is a good reason for the lack of geographic dispersal: they are neither wanted - nor want to be there.
So the solution is to dump them in all Gateshead, Middlesbrough and other such places ?
People in the Leafy shires want these people helped but don’t want to do any of the helping.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
Here in the South West there is a massive shortage of staff in cafes, pubs and restaurants. Anyone who is unemployed could come down tomorrow and get a job. The problem is that they could not find anywhere to live.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
I agree with some of your points but the reason the food processing plants are in Wisbech rather than Widnes is because that is where the fields are. You grow crops where the soil and climate conditions are most favourable and then you process as close to there as possible.
But I agree that people should move for work. It has always been the way - people forget the mining communities that moved wholesale from places like Durham to south Wales in the early 20th century. Indeed my father moved from Essex to Liverpool to Nottingham and finally to Newark in the first 4 years of my life because those places were where the work was at the time.
I've moved up and down the country for work so yes people should do so. There is a problem though that housing costs are now so high that "just move" isn't something that is viable for a lot of jobs in a lot of places.
Philip's beloved free market says let people buy houses. The problem is that people with money can buy houses at a higher price than people with less or no money. Unless they are going to live in them and do the local jobs essential to that economy (as opposed to having it as a summer home or Air BnB) then there aren't homes at a viable price for people to move to.
I found this rather enjoyable to write, and if you happen to be thinking of reading about the Second Punic War, which is an eminently wise thought to have, the blog may be of some use.
Thanks. An enjoyable read on your blog. Not an area or era I know much about.
Mr. Dickson, I do not trust the Government or the Opposition with that sort of nonsense over here.
Fair point. If you are referring to the Westminster government. I would trust the Scottish one.
I would not trust the current crooks running Scottish government any more than I trust Tories. Both lying cheating stealing no marks.
Sadly my response would be that of course they are - they are politicians.
I have genuine admiration for the fact that you are able to separate the cause of independence from many of those who are advocating it but who are not to be admired. Sadly I think that right now Sturgeon is probably the best chance Scotland has of getting that independence but - a la Churchill after WW2 - I hope that once that is achieved the Scots have the good sense to dump Sturgeon and her cabal for some politicians who are not quite so mired in the cesspool.
But that is part of the point - to be able to dump those ruling Scotland should we so wish. We can't dump Mr Johnson and his crew.
I thought I was obviously agreeing with you in what I wrote. I am in favour of Scottish Independence for entirely positive reasons. One of those would be the ability to dump people like Sturgeon and Johnson. But right now I think Sturgeon is a necessary evil for Scottish independence.
Quite so: I was thinking more on how others might react to that. It's not been a good two years for the party, and it has shown, but I'm keeping an open mind on her current policies - in particular, I want to see how COP26 plays out.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?
My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.
So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
So your answer seems to be to import cheap foreign labour to live in squalid conditions in Wisbech so that Wizzy Food Co can maintain its profit margins?
I mean personally I am all in favour of migration and people being able to move where they want for whatever reason but your argument is actually utterly illogical. So long as the factory is in Wisbech (which funnily enough I drove past last night coming back from a wedding) then the food manufacturers must pay enough for the workers to be able to afford to live there whether those workers are from Widnes or Wroclaw. The days of expecting people to work for less than a living wage should be behind us.
I totally agree. The reason it does not happen, though, is because we demand unsustainably cheap food. The producers are squeezed by the supermarkets and the supermarkets do it because their customers expect it.
Just catching up having been away. A couple of comments if I may:
1. Lovely to see so many Tories campaigning so vigorously for significant rises in working people's wages to counter the alleged labour shortage. Something at last that the lefties on here can agree with the Tories about. Strange old world, isn't it? 2. I'd have thought the more radical Tory solution would be to lock more people up. I read on here that prisoners are much sought after. If you imprison a lot more people, then release them early, wouldn't that be a more cost effective solution to labour shortages?
I don't see any tories apart from DavidL saying pay rises for minimum wage folk is a good thing. I am not a tory neither I believe is another richard
If not a Tory what would you describe yourself and 'another richard' as being?
Wouldn't a Tory be a member or otherwise strong supporter of the Conservative party ?
Something which Hyufd and a few other PBers - Casino, Mortimer, MM, Max - might be classed as.
But which neither I nor to my knowledge Pagan2 are.
Can we clear this up once and for all. Being 'A Tory' is not an ethnicity it is simply a voting intention. I can understand why you're in denial-particularly at the moment - but to suggest neither you nor 'Another Richard' would vote for anyone else (except perhaps UKIP) is plainly ridiculous.
So time to man up and say 'I'm a Tory and I'm proud"
Exactly so, Roger. All the dissembling that goes on around this. It's as if being a Tory is something shameful. Why would anyone feel that? Beats me.
"I'm not a member. I've voted for different parties over the years. It was about Brexit. You're forgetting the choice. It was that or Corbyn."
Bla bla bla. None of this is relevant. It's interesting but it's off the point. If you voted Tory in the last general election YOU ARE A TORY and this state persists until rectified by a sincere and firm intention to vote otherwise in the next one.
Why are you so desperate to put labels on people and file them under discrete but broad categories ?
A process which inevitably leads to division and hostility.
In the real world people are individuals with a wide range of experiences, interests and views, often surprising and sometimes seemingly contradictory.
My sense is we are now well passed peak Johnson and peak Tory. Downhill from here IMHO and there are cracks starting to show between Sunak and Johnson, Sunak I believe is a lot more austerity/Cameron-economics than he would like you to believe
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
Here in the South West there is a massive shortage of staff in cafes, pubs and restaurants. Anyone who is unemployed could come down tomorrow and get a job. The problem is that they could not find anywhere to live.
Because half the villages are filled with 2nd home owners who will then moan they can't get the service when they want a coffee in their local cafe.
If you want to make a real a difference to the economic outlook for these places you should put a hefty tax on second home owners. We tax all manner of things that are bad for our health, second homes would seem an obvious addition to that list.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?
My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.
So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
So your answer seems to be to import cheap foreign labour to live in squalid conditions in Wisbech so that Wizzy Food Co can maintain its profit margins?
I mean personally I am all in favour of migration and people being able to move where they want for whatever reason but your argument is actually utterly illogical. So long as the factory is in Wisbech (which funnily enough I drove past last night coming back from a wedding) then the food manufacturers must pay enough for the workers to be able to afford to live there whether those workers are from Widnes or Wroclaw. The days of expecting people to work for less than a living wage should be behind us.
I totally agree. The reason it does not happen, though, is because we demand unsustainably cheap food. The producers are squeezed by the supermarkets and the supermarkets do it because their customers expect it.
Again agreed. Of course it is easy for me to bemoan this when I can afford increased food prices from buying local and seasonal. I do understand that many cannot. But I am not sure how much the increased food price argument works when you see the vast profits being made by supermarkets.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
How long ago was it when Scott was pasting predictions of mass unemployment ?
Why is there unemployment and a huge labour shortage at the same time, what are the lazy barstewards lounging on the dole living it up not forced at gunpoint to get their arse's out the door and do a day's work.
I appreciate this is a wind-up but have you ever tried 'living it up' on UC?
Of course not , I have worked all my life. You rightly point out it is a wind up but it does have a serious point to it. In any proper functioning country it should be impossible to have so many unemployed people whilst at same time having a huge labour shortage. It shows how badly the country is run , how poor government agencies are and is a scandal. It does not impact the Tories and as long as they are all well paid and living it up , they do not give a hoot. Labour are only a hair's breadth different nowadays so it is a case of the devil or the deep blue sea.
The jobs are not where the unemployed are. We can either try to relocate the unemployed, or try to relocate the jobs.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?
My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.
So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
So your answer seems to be to import cheap foreign labour to live in squalid conditions in Wisbech so that Wizzy Food Co can maintain its profit margins?
I mean personally I am all in favour of migration and people being able to move where they want for whatever reason but your argument is actually utterly illogical. So long as the factory is in Wisbech (which funnily enough I drove past last night coming back from a wedding) then the food manufacturers must pay enough for the workers to be able to afford to live there whether those workers are from Widnes or Wroclaw. The days of expecting people to work for less than a living wage should be behind us.
I agree with you - wages need to be higher. BTW a lot of the operators in anglia are not sat on mega operating margins. As we now have less workers from Wroclaw then workers must come from Widnes etc. The problem is that they cannot pay enough wages to do so.
Besides which, there is a bigger problem. Lets assume that there is affordable housing. Lets assume that there is a large scale increase in food prices (think 30%+) to create sufficient margins to allow wages to rise significantly. So the £ gap to promote internal migration isn't there.
But its still Wisbech. An awful lot of people don't want to live in the sticks. Especially when its as dull as the farming flatlands of eastern England.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?
My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.
So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
So your answer seems to be to import cheap foreign labour to live in squalid conditions in Wisbech so that Wizzy Food Co can maintain its profit margins?
I mean personally I am all in favour of migration and people being able to move where they want for whatever reason but your argument is actually utterly illogical. So long as the factory is in Wisbech (which funnily enough I drove past last night coming back from a wedding) then the food manufacturers must pay enough for the workers to be able to afford to live there whether those workers are from Widnes or Wroclaw. The days of expecting people to work for less than a living wage should be behind us.
I totally agree. The reason it does not happen, though, is because we demand unsustainably cheap food. The producers are squeezed by the supermarkets and the supermarkets do it because their customers expect it.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
I'm loving your inflation is good narrative. First it was supply/ demand inflation will reduce the deficit, now wage-price spiral inflation saves the economy.
I think I can throw my 1980s A Level Economics textbook in the bin.
Of course you can throw your 1980s textbook into the bin, much has changed in the past 40 years.
How does your 1980s textbook deal with deflation? Or quantitative easing? Etc
I never said we should have wage-price spiral inflation. Having real pay rises doesn't mean a wage-price spiral, indeed kind of by definition it doesn't since if there is such a spiral then the pay rise isn't real.
What mysticism is this of which you speak?
The rules are still this. If you pay the Barista more money, the coffee he/she serves you goes up, otherwise profits reduce
That's not the rules. There's this thing called productivity.
If you pay the Barista more money, maybe the business invests in a better coffee machine that can produce more coffee per hour or replaces the Barista by an automated machine, and the labour cost element of the coffee goes down.
As we improve productivity real terms pay rises become viable. It's the only thing that makes them viable.
And there's the problem.
There are some jobs where it's possible to get big gains in productivity. Great, innovation and productivity, getting more value for less input are good things.
But there are other jobs where it's hard to squeeze out more productivity and, if we're honest, it's hard to see where the extra productivity could be squeezed out. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but sadly she is sometimes childless.
Take your barista example. Sure, you can give them a bigger or faster machine. But the other parts of the job- taking the orders, collecting the money, keeping the cafe looking nice, flirting with the customers... that's much harder to automate. And that's mostly what we are after when we go to a cafe or a restaurant.
Or lorry driving. There were gains made when computers got efficient at route planning, but the big picture is a driver with a container and unless you are planning on making the container bigger, the productivity gains aren't huge.
Or social care. There's an irreducible core to the job- a carer and someone in need. There are probably gains around the edges, but not much at a fundamental level.
The spottiness of productivity gains- some areas become massively more productive while the nature of others means that productivity gains are slower to negligible- is one of the things that a strong free-market model struggles with. Part of the answer is that we should all value some things more then we do, but that leads to the counterintuitive result that people in less productive fields should also see their incomes rise alongside those in more productive areas.
But it's not all or nothing, and it's not only technology that drives productivity growth.
Currently we can be in a situation where there's eight cafes or takeaways virtually next door to each other on the high street. If prices go up due to a labour shortage then they don't suddenly all price themselves out of business overnight.
Maybe the least productive business, the one where management is content to see the staff "flirt with the customers" aka gossip with their mates instead of providing good cleanliness and customer service goes out of business.
The overall productivity of the market goes up by the least productive business failing and higher prices/wages are affordable.
I was choosing lampshades yesterday and arranging flowers in vases and plumping cushions and knitting and other housewifely tasks. The sorts of things that I'm sure you imagine me doing all the time. In the evening there was a visit from a steam train - all beautifully polished up - with the lucky travellers inside drinking their Prosecco while us yokels stared and waved. All very Railway Children-esque and there was certainly enough steam around to make the reappearance of long lost fathers seem almost possible.
I trust all was sweetness and light on here, yes?
Meanwhile Kabul airport has turned into a mixture of Hillsborough and Sophie's Choice. Horrible.
Still, the sun is out today - which makes a nice change as yesterday the rain was atrocious. The Tahiti lime tree still needs planting as did not fancy doing it while trying to avoid drowning.
There is a prison nearby, mostly full of sex offenders and paedophiles. They have a prison shop and sell plants which they grow. I did mention to Daughter the idea mooted by others of having prisoners work in her pub but the look she gave me .....
Anyway, if you want a good documentary about another British fuck-up as they leave a country they should never have invaded (ooh, a bit of controversy!) The Road to Partition - only 2 episodes - is on BBC iPlayer and is very good.
Sounds pretty good on the home front!
I've often been struck by the consistent pattern of the failure of partition as we dismantled the Empire. It led directly to permanent strife in all of India, Israel, Cyprus and Ireland. A similar process without much British involvement happened in Yugoslavia, and arguably Ukraine is another example. That's not to say that unitary solutions always work well, but trying to settle rival groups into adjoining nations seems to be a recipe for catastrophe, fuelling the rise of aggressive nationalism and open warfare.
What was interesting to me was that Lloyd George's attempts at resolution were all predicated on the assumptions that lay behind Home Rule and ignored the rise of Sinn Fein after WW1. He was answering questions posed in 1912 not in 1921. That and the nervousness which James Craig on the Unionist side had about Britain betraying the Unionists. No love lost there.
In the end the British did what they often do - got enough of a solution to make it look as if they'd solved the problem, walked away, caused lots of problems elsewhere and left the real issues for subsequent generations to grapple with.
In Ireland partition was probably inevitable given the plantation of Scots and others in Ulster from the 17th C onwards. The solution to one problem then leading to a yet bigger one two centuries later, the solution to that leading to another bloody one 40 years later and so on and on. Quite what the current temporary solution will lead to who knows. But kicking difficult issues into the long grass is not just the preserve of British governments.
Counties Fermanagh and Tyrone both had Catholic majorities at the 1911 Census (56% and 55%), and Nationalist majorities at the 1918 election (54% and 55%). Yet they were included in Northern Ireland!
I think the original original plan was to include the whole of Ulster in NI, but Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan managed to opt out (I think i read somewhere).
They were cut loose by James Craig so that the area they held had a guaranteed Protestant majority - 66% as opposed to the 56% if all 9 counties of Ulster were included. And then they proceeded to gerrymander in those areas within the 6 counties which still had Nationalist majorities and elected Nationalist representatives in the elections held from 1920 onwards.
From the start NI was all about keeping Catholics down, out of power and often out of jobs, as well as ignoring the settled will of the British Parliament. Loyalty to Britain was very conditional.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
Here in the South West there is a massive shortage of staff in cafes, pubs and restaurants. Anyone who is unemployed could come down tomorrow and get a job. The problem is that they could not find anywhere to live.
Because half the villages are filled with 2nd home owners who will then moan they can't get the service when they want a coffee in their local cafe.
If you want to make a real a difference to the economic outlook for these places you should put a hefty tax on second home owners. We tax all manner of things that are bad for our health, second homes would seem an obvious addition to that list.
Yep - spot on. But it will not happen. At least, not under a Conservative government.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
Here in the South West there is a massive shortage of staff in cafes, pubs and restaurants. Anyone who is unemployed could come down tomorrow and get a job. The problem is that they could not find anywhere to live.
Because half the villages are filled with 2nd home owners who will then moan they can't get the service when they want a coffee in their local cafe.
If you want to make a real a difference to the economic outlook for these places you should put a hefty tax on second home owners. We tax all manner of things that are bad for our health, second homes would seem an obvious addition to that list.
Tenby restaurants shutting because they can't get the staff.
"Tenby is now owned by second home owners, much like the rest of the desirable parts of the county. Years ago, the Tenby kids filled these jobs. Seasonal work such as this is of no real benefit to an adult paying rent or a mortgage because of its intermittent nature. Now the Tenby kids are all gone. They all live somewhere else, because their parents all got priced out of the market by investors from the cities and rich incomers. There is nowhere to park in Tenby. The public transport situation is dire. Mix all these ingredients up and there you have it, a work force pushed away, either into another area, or into a state of depression about their situation that makes them unwilling to work for just pride and no money."
Polybius is one of my favourite writers, partly due to the subject matter and partly because he usually does a good job of being pretty impartial. Plus the Second Punic War was what got me into classical history, so he, along with Livy, was one of the first I read.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?
My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.
So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
So your answer seems to be to import cheap foreign labour to live in squalid conditions in Wisbech so that Wizzy Food Co can maintain its profit margins?
I mean personally I am all in favour of migration and people being able to move where they want for whatever reason but your argument is actually utterly illogical. So long as the factory is in Wisbech (which funnily enough I drove past last night coming back from a wedding) then the food manufacturers must pay enough for the workers to be able to afford to live there whether those workers are from Widnes or Wroclaw. The days of expecting people to work for less than a living wage should be behind us.
I totally agree. The reason it does not happen, though, is because we demand unsustainably cheap food. The producers are squeezed by the supermarkets and the supermarkets do it because their customers expect it.
Again agreed. Of course it is easy for me to bemoan this when I can afford increased food prices from buying local and seasonal. I do understand that many cannot. But I am not sure how much the increased food price argument works when you see the vast profits being made by supermarkets.
They aren't making vast profits from selling food though. Big supermarkets are grossly inefficient to operate, some of them (Sainsbury's for example) almost laughably so. They can't charge enough from selling food to cover their costs because more efficient operators (like Aldi and Lidl) keep prices down and they have to compete.
We're seeing food price inflation again at the moment which is largely being driven from cost price inflation of basic staples not profiteering. Production prices rise, but retail prices cannot keep in check. So we get to the big margin squeeze, and as Brexit costs keep escalating (and haven't anywhere near fully kicked in yet) and we see structural issues like a shortage of drivers / workers it will get a lot worse.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?
My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.
So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
So your answer seems to be to import cheap foreign labour to live in squalid conditions in Wisbech so that Wizzy Food Co can maintain its profit margins?
I mean personally I am all in favour of migration and people being able to move where they want for whatever reason but your argument is actually utterly illogical. So long as the factory is in Wisbech (which funnily enough I drove past last night coming back from a wedding) then the food manufacturers must pay enough for the workers to be able to afford to live there whether those workers are from Widnes or Wroclaw. The days of expecting people to work for less than a living wage should be behind us.
I totally agree. The reason it does not happen, though, is because we demand unsustainably cheap food. The producers are squeezed by the supermarkets and the supermarkets do it because their customers expect it.
Because their customers can't afford it.
Absolutely. But they are going to have to if the wages that are required to get UK citizens to move to places where there are jobs are to be affordable for businesses.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
Here in the South West there is a massive shortage of staff in cafes, pubs and restaurants. Anyone who is unemployed could come down tomorrow and get a job. The problem is that they could not find anywhere to live.
Because half the villages are filled with 2nd home owners who will then moan they can't get the service when they want a coffee in their local cafe.
If you want to make a real a difference to the economic outlook for these places you should put a hefty tax on second home owners. We tax all manner of things that are bad for our health, second homes would seem an obvious addition to that list.
Yep - spot on. But it will not happen. At least, not under a Conservative government.
Therefore it will not happen
Can you imagine SKS support it couldnt even support a 3% pay rise for nurses or raising Corporation Tax
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
Here in the South West there is a massive shortage of staff in cafes, pubs and restaurants. Anyone who is unemployed could come down tomorrow and get a job. The problem is that they could not find anywhere to live.
Because half the villages are filled with 2nd home owners who will then moan they can't get the service when they want a coffee in their local cafe.
If you want to make a real a difference to the economic outlook for these places you should put a hefty tax on second home owners. We tax all manner of things that are bad for our health, second homes would seem an obvious addition to that list.
Tenby restaurants shutting because they can't get the staff.
"Tenby is now owned by second home owners, much like the rest of the desirable parts of the county. Years ago, the Tenby kids filled these jobs. Seasonal work such as this is of no real benefit to an adult paying rent or a mortgage because of its intermittent nature. Now the Tenby kids are all gone. They all live somewhere else, because their parents all got priced out of the market by investors from the cities and rich incomers. There is nowhere to park in Tenby. The public transport situation is dire. Mix all these ingredients up and there you have it, a work force pushed away, either into another area, or into a state of depression about their situation that makes them unwilling to work for just pride and no money."
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
What arrogance and condescension.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Question - have you ever been to Wisbech...?
My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.
So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
No, I've never been to Wisbech.
If people don't want to live "in Wizzy" then why is the median house price £177k? If nobody wanted to live their then houses would be literally worthless.
So you're clearly fallacious that that nobody wants to live their. Maybe you don't, but others do and they're willing to buy houses their at a median of £177k - and if the employers their increase pay rates higher then that'd attract even more people willing to live their than there already are.
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
Here in the South West there is a massive shortage of staff in cafes, pubs and restaurants. Anyone who is unemployed could come down tomorrow and get a job. The problem is that they could not find anywhere to live.
Because half the villages are filled with 2nd home owners who will then moan they can't get the service when they want a coffee in their local cafe.
If you want to make a real a difference to the economic outlook for these places you should put a hefty tax on second home owners. We tax all manner of things that are bad for our health, second homes would seem an obvious addition to that list.
Yep - spot on. But it will not happen. At least, not under a Conservative government.
Therefore it will not happen
Can you imagine SKS support it couldnt even support a 3% pay rise for nurses or raising Corporation Tax
Labor under SKS are right of Tories under Johnson
You are laughable. You cannot write these posts with a straight face
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
Here in the South West there is a massive shortage of staff in cafes, pubs and restaurants. Anyone who is unemployed could come down tomorrow and get a job. The problem is that they could not find anywhere to live.
Because half the villages are filled with 2nd home owners who will then moan they can't get the service when they want a coffee in their local cafe.
If you want to make a real a difference to the economic outlook for these places you should put a hefty tax on second home owners. We tax all manner of things that are bad for our health, second homes would seem an obvious addition to that list.
Tenby restaurants shutting because they can't get the staff.
"Tenby is now owned by second home owners, much like the rest of the desirable parts of the county. Years ago, the Tenby kids filled these jobs. Seasonal work such as this is of no real benefit to an adult paying rent or a mortgage because of its intermittent nature. Now the Tenby kids are all gone. They all live somewhere else, because their parents all got priced out of the market by investors from the cities and rich incomers. There is nowhere to park in Tenby. The public transport situation is dire. Mix all these ingredients up and there you have it, a work force pushed away, either into another area, or into a state of depression about their situation that makes them unwilling to work for just pride and no money."
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
Wasn't on yesterday when it was "done to death" but the simple reality is that your "its over / its done / its simple" is not what the industry are experiencing. If there was a simple solution it would have been done already.
This is a long term structural issue. We have too many jobs that Brits don't want to / can't afford to do in places where the people who need a job don't live. We had EU migration to fill these roles because there was literally no labour available.
When you are running an anglian food factory and you cannot get people to do night shifts at any salary, it not an issue of "low pay". Stop quoting rhetoric to solve a practical problem.
How did we cope before 2004? (Genuine question)
Dunno, but how does that change the reality of now? Where the jobs are in hospitality in towns and cities then yes, replace EU workers with UK. Where the jobs are in things like food production, the available British workforce is not largely where the jobs are.
If as the Brexiteers insist we don't need / want EU labour we need to start encouraging people not going from college into University to move into the sticks to start taking factory and farming jobs.
The way to encourage people to do that, is to raise pay rates.
Businesses can either increase pay until it reaches an equilibrium whereby they find people who want to go into the sticks and take the jobs . . . or they can prefer to go out of business rather than offering attractive wages. Its a free market.
As with @DavidL this is rhetoric. How much £ will you need to offer to get people to relocate from towns into the countryside where houses generally cost more and the cost of living is higher? When these manufacturers aren't rolling in huge profit margins?
As I'm not a rural manufacturer, I won't offer a penny.
For those who are running those businesses they will either need to offer rates sufficiently high as to fill the vacancies, or do without the labourers and raise productivity, or shut down.
That's how a free market operates. We don't need central command and control.
And the reason why we need central command and control is that your plan delivers two things. (1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential (2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
1) No we don't. If the jobs are essential then they can command whatever price is required to fill them. If they can't, they weren't essential in the first place.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
Its endless rhetoric disconnected from reality and increasingly from sanity as well.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
Here in the South West there is a massive shortage of staff in cafes, pubs and restaurants. Anyone who is unemployed could come down tomorrow and get a job. The problem is that they could not find anywhere to live.
Because half the villages are filled with 2nd home owners who will then moan they can't get the service when they want a coffee in their local cafe.
If you want to make a real a difference to the economic outlook for these places you should put a hefty tax on second home owners. We tax all manner of things that are bad for our health, second homes would seem an obvious addition to that list.
Tenby restaurants shutting because they can't get the staff.
"Tenby is now owned by second home owners, much like the rest of the desirable parts of the county. Years ago, the Tenby kids filled these jobs. Seasonal work such as this is of no real benefit to an adult paying rent or a mortgage because of its intermittent nature. Now the Tenby kids are all gone. They all live somewhere else, because their parents all got priced out of the market by investors from the cities and rich incomers. There is nowhere to park in Tenby. The public transport situation is dire. Mix all these ingredients up and there you have it, a work force pushed away, either into another area, or into a state of depression about their situation that makes them unwilling to work for just pride and no money."
It's a similar story across the SW of England. I am in Fowey at the moment. Many restaurants, bars and pubs are not serving evening meals and are closing on certain days because there's no-one to employ to take the money that is just waiting to be collected.
Jane Ferguson @JaneFerguson5 1. The #BritishMilitary here at #KabulAirport have shown breathtaking levels of toughness, professionalism and - rare in war times I must say - compassion. I've been moved to tears by their actions, diving into dangerous crowds to pull visa-holders into the base....
We did this to death yesterday Scott. A shortage of labour is a good thing. It drives up wages of the low paid, it encourages investment, training and the boosting of productivity. It gives prisoners, for example, a way out of recidivism. It is a better alternative than mickey mouse courses for many of our young.
We have 5-6m Europeans with residency rights here, most of working age. That really should be enough.
How long ago was it when Scott was pasting predictions of mass unemployment ?
Why is there unemployment and a huge labour shortage at the same time, what are the lazy barstewards lounging on the dole living it up not forced at gunpoint to get their arse's out the door and do a day's work.
I appreciate this is a wind-up but have you ever tried 'living it up' on UC?
Of course not , I have worked all my life. You rightly point out it is a wind up but it does have a serious point to it. In any proper functioning country it should be impossible to have so many unemployed people whilst at same time having a huge labour shortage. It shows how badly the country is run , how poor government agencies are and is a scandal. It does not impact the Tories and as long as they are all well paid and living it up , they do not give a hoot. Labour are only a hair's breadth different nowadays so it is a case of the devil or the deep blue sea.
The jobs are not where the unemployed are. We can either try to relocate the unemployed, or try to relocate the jobs.
Yes, but most subsidies are for large farmers etc, they ought to be subsiding real farm employment etc and not just the big boys. Failure to build decent low cost housing in lots of these rural areas is another thing that is needed, SNP have been as bad as Tories at that and so young people are forced to move to cities making things worse all the time. The government policies are a shambles, not enough votes in it for them.
Comments
This is one of the key drivers of parliamentary angst over Afghanistan. Most polling would suggest the public don’t mind. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/08/fate-afghanistan-shows-why-west-must-not-abandon-intervention
What do you think think the other 30 million workers are doing ?
The rules are still this. If you pay the Barista more money, the coffee he/she serves you goes up, otherwise profits reduce
https://thaddeusthesixth.blogspot.com/2021/08/comparing-penguin-and-oxford-editions.html
I found this rather enjoyable to write, and if you happen to be thinking of reading about the Second Punic War, which is an eminently wise thought to have, the blog may be of some use.
If you pay the Barista more money, maybe the business invests in a better coffee machine that can produce more coffee per hour or replaces the Barista by an automated machine, and the labour cost element of the coffee goes down.
As we improve productivity real terms pay rises become viable. It's the only thing that makes them viable.
(1) We lose whole chunks of industry that are essential
(2) We have a sustained and embedded unemployment issue
I have genuine admiration for the fact that you are able to separate the cause of independence from many of those who are advocating it but who are not to be admired. Sadly I think that right now Sturgeon is probably the best chance Scotland has of getting that independence but - a la Churchill after WW2 - I hope that once that is achieved the Scots have the good sense to dump Sturgeon and her cabal for some politicians who are not quite so mired in the cesspool.
The trend is roughly the more deprived the area the great the number of asylum seekers it takes.
The most extreme difference is in Scotland where Glasgow has 59 asylum seekers per 10k population and every other district has zero.
2) No we don't. How do we get a sustained unemployment issue as a result of full employment? The jobs that are the most productive pay whatever is required to fill the vacancies, those that are least productive die off, we have full employment and higher productivity.
To be fair, in the 1918 election Fermanagh was won by the Unionists.
Edit Proof-reading and correction of 'auto-correct'.
(1) How do anglian food producers pay enough to get factory shift workers to be able to want and afford to move to (shudder) Wisbech? Its laughable to suggest they can, so without labour they shut and don't get replaced. We need food, so we will import more instead, which means we have a farming sector unable to sell its produce as the processors have gone so that goes as well.
(2) Sustained unemployment in the places where unemployment is a structural issue. We already have effective full employment in parts of the country. The jobs aren't where the unemployed are.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/22/one-upshot-of-brexit-johnson-didnt-foresee-bringing-the-irish-closer
"I'm not a member. I've voted for different parties over the years. It was about Brexit. You're forgetting the choice. It was that or Corbyn."
Bla bla bla. None of this is relevant. It's interesting but it's off the point. If you voted Tory in the last general election YOU ARE A TORY and this state persists until rectified by a sincere and firm intention to vote otherwise in the next one.
https://twitter.com/SavLocal/status/1429385186609926146
People who rail against legalisation & regulation of the cannabis trade seem to me like those who thought Prohibition was great because it kept people away from 160 proof spirit laced with antifreeze.
In reality, I suspect that we will just import a lot of goods rather than a lot of workers.
Why can't people move to Wisbech? Or people living in Wisbech fill those vacancies? Why can people from Warsaw move to Wisbech but people from Widnes can't?
If there's sustained unemployment maybe the unemployed should fill one of the jobs that are on offer? If the jobs aren't where they are, they can move to where the jobs are. Or employers can move to where the people are.
If there's an abundance of labour available at Widnes but not Wisbech then why doesn't a processor set up in Widnes? Or wherever else needs jobs?
Even the media have moved on
He is going nowhere though he clearly has damaged his future in the party
And by the way, he was part of the Cobra meeting on Friday 13th August
Thinking one up would be a good place to start for Dominic Raab's replacement.
My "arrogance and condescension" is just reality. People aren't moving to east anglia - a place they don't want to live - to do jobs they don't want to do at a cost they can't afford. Media house price in Wizzy is £177k vs £130k in Widnes.
So your Wizzy food factory needs to cover the 36% higher house price and the higher cost of living before you even start trying to make the job and the prospects look attractive.
There are some jobs where it's possible to get big gains in productivity. Great, innovation and productivity, getting more value for less input are good things.
But there are other jobs where it's hard to squeeze out more productivity and, if we're honest, it's hard to see where the extra productivity could be squeezed out. Necessity may be the mother of invention, but sadly she is sometimes childless.
Take your barista example. Sure, you can give them a bigger or faster machine. But the other parts of the job- taking the orders, collecting the money, keeping the cafe looking nice, flirting with the customers... that's much harder to automate. And that's mostly what we are after when we go to a cafe or a restaurant.
Or lorry driving. There were gains made when computers got efficient at route planning, but the big picture is a driver with a container and unless you are planning on making the container bigger, the productivity gains aren't huge.
Or social care. There's an irreducible core to the job- a carer and someone in need. There are probably gains around the edges, but not much at a fundamental level.
The spottiness of productivity gains- some areas become massively more productive while the nature of others means that productivity gains are slower to negligible- is one of the things that a strong free-market model struggles with. Part of the answer is that we should all value some things more then we do, but that leads to the counterintuitive result that people in less productive fields should also see their incomes rise alongside those in more productive areas.
If as you suggest in the future there's an abundance of domestic agriculture needing processing and a shortage of processing plants then the processing plants will be in high demand/low supply.
So they can increase prices, increasing profits, some of which can go to higher wages. Higher wages will attract more staff.
Higher prices will attract more investors into the sector increasing supply.
And lo and behold the problem is solved. Economics 101. We don't need central planning or Luddism to protect every unproductive job.
But I agree that people should move for work. It has always been the way - people forget the mining communities that moved wholesale from places like Durham to south Wales in the early 20th century. Indeed my father moved from Essex to Liverpool to Nottingham and finally to Newark in the first 4 years of my life because those places were where the work was at the time.
Of course I ended up paying back my dole 100s of times over in taxes but I'll be forever grateful for that safety net.
These days, now retired, I do a day a week for Citizens Advice; I've yet to come across anyone on the dole who wants to be there or is 'living it up'.
A more equitable distribution of pay within organisations would be no bad thing either.
There is a good reason for the lack of geographic dispersal: they are neither wanted - nor want to be there.
Morning, Malky! Had a foggy morning over here and still cloudy with small showers around. Hope it's brighter over your way - been enough rain of late.
I mean personally I am all in favour of migration and people being able to move where they want for whatever reason but your argument is actually utterly illogical. So long as the factory is in Wisbech (which funnily enough I drove past last night coming back from a wedding) then the food manufacturers must pay enough for the workers to be able to afford to live there whether those workers are from Widnes or Wroclaw. The days of expecting people to work for less than a living wage should be behind us.
Afaics the people who voted for Cameron and now despise him are the same people who voted for May and now despise her, and also the the same people who voted for BJ but are still defending his every ineptitude and moral failing.
The one consistency seems to be that they bear no responsibility for any of the consequences of voting for these fine folk.
So the solution is to dump them in all Gateshead, Middlesbrough and other such places ?
People in the Leafy shires want these people helped but don’t want to do any of the helping.
Philip's beloved free market says let people buy houses. The problem is that people with money can buy houses at a higher price than people with less or no money. Unless they are going to live in them and do the local jobs essential to that economy (as opposed to having it as a summer home or Air BnB) then there aren't homes at a viable price for people to move to.
A process which inevitably leads to division and hostility.
In the real world people are individuals with a wide range of experiences, interests and views, often surprising and sometimes seemingly contradictory.
Plus ça change
If you want to make a real a difference to the economic outlook for these places you should put a hefty tax on second home owners. We tax all manner of things that are bad for our health, second homes would seem an obvious addition to that list.
https://twitter.com/mrmcenaney/status/1429387923288432641?s=21
Besides which, there is a bigger problem. Lets assume that there is affordable housing. Lets assume that there is a large scale increase in food prices (think 30%+) to create sufficient margins to allow wages to rise significantly. So the £ gap to promote internal migration isn't there.
But its still Wisbech. An awful lot of people don't want to live in the sticks. Especially when its as dull as the farming flatlands of eastern England.
Currently we can be in a situation where there's eight cafes or takeaways virtually next door to each other on the high street. If prices go up due to a labour shortage then they don't suddenly all price themselves out of business overnight.
Maybe the least productive business, the one where management is content to see the staff "flirt with the customers" aka gossip with their mates instead of providing good cleanliness and customer service goes out of business.
The overall productivity of the market goes up by the least productive business failing and higher prices/wages are affordable.
From the start NI was all about keeping Catholics down, out of power and often out of jobs, as well as ignoring the settled will of the British Parliament. Loyalty to Britain was very conditional.
I am anyone but Starmer who will certainly lose another election.
Andy Burnham needs a seat and to become leader.
Then your bet would not be a mug bet
Tenby restaurants shutting because they can't get the staff.
https://postcardsfromthehedge.car.blog/2021/08/20/mutiny-in-the-county/
"Tenby is now owned by second home owners, much like the rest of the desirable parts of the county. Years ago, the Tenby kids filled these jobs. Seasonal work such as this is of no real benefit to an adult paying rent or a mortgage because of its intermittent nature. Now the Tenby kids are all gone. They all live somewhere else, because their parents all got priced out of the market by investors from the cities and rich incomers. There is nowhere to park in Tenby. The public transport situation is dire. Mix all these ingredients up and there you have it, a work force pushed away, either into another area, or into a state of depression about their situation that makes them unwilling to work for just pride and no money."
Polybius is one of my favourite writers, partly due to the subject matter and partly because he usually does a good job of being pretty impartial. Plus the Second Punic War was what got me into classical history, so he, along with Livy, was one of the first I read.
We're seeing food price inflation again at the moment which is largely being driven from cost price inflation of basic staples not profiteering. Production prices rise, but retail prices cannot keep in check. So we get to the big margin squeeze, and as Brexit costs keep escalating (and haven't anywhere near fully kicked in yet) and we see structural issues like a shortage of drivers / workers it will get a lot worse.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0048969721004654
Can you imagine SKS support it couldnt even support a 3% pay rise for nurses or raising Corporation Tax
Labor under SKS are right of Tories under Johnson
If people don't want to live "in Wizzy" then why is the median house price £177k? If nobody wanted to live their then houses would be literally worthless.
So you're clearly fallacious that that nobody wants to live their. Maybe you don't, but others do and they're willing to buy houses their at a median of £177k - and if the employers their increase pay rates higher then that'd attract even more people willing to live their than there already are.
Jane Ferguson
@JaneFerguson5
1. The #BritishMilitary here at #KabulAirport have shown breathtaking levels of toughness, professionalism and - rare in war times I must say - compassion. I've been moved to tears by their actions, diving into dangerous crowds to pull visa-holders into the base....