It is very good that wages are rising albeit that creates inflationary pressure as discussed yesterday on here in the morning and, it turns out, by the Bank of England in the afternoon (PB leading the way).
At some point the buck has to stop and rising wages and prices and wages and prices become a problem for the country in all sorts of ways that we won't repeat. The BoE is worried about it which seems a reasonably independent institution.
But the issue that policy makers have to grapple with, and the comparison is with the supermarkets and their treatment of their suppliers, is whether the benefit to the whole country (via lower or suppressed wages/prices) is more important than the factor inputs (ie wages in this case) being kept low.
No rising wages are not a problem, they're an entirely good thing so long as the market can afford them.
For too many years people have claimed that rising prices are a good thing, while rising wages are a bad one. That misrepresentation has to be reversed.
Rising wages lead to rising prices. Rising prices can be a problem. Productivity gains are what can break the cycle.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
Likewise in agriculture.
The mantra of fruit and veg farmers in southern England has evolved since the 1990s:
The locals aren't willing to do the work so get some Northerners to do it. The Northerners aren't willing to do the work so get some Irish to do it. The Irish aren't willing to do the work so get some Portuguese to do it. The Portuguese aren't willing to do the work so get some Poles to do it. The Poles aren't willing to do the work so get some Romanians to do it. The Romanians aren't willing to do the work so get some Bulgarian to do it. The Bulgarians aren't willing to do the work so get some Ukrainians to do it.
I believe they're now trying to get workers from Central Asia.
Well it might give the Afghan refugees a job opportunity but the model is fundamentally flawed.
Afghans need jobs and the farming jobs there are mainly opium which is generally frowned on so this sounds like a pretty great model? What's the problem with it specifically? As far as I can see everyone gets their fruit and veg, everyone involved gets a better job, and the only thing that might see production drop is opium, which is already seeing lower demand because it's getting out-competed by fentanyl.
The more is fundamentally flawed because you need ever poorer countries to source your labour supply from.
What we should have done is outsourced our Diamorphine production to the Taliban.
Once we had them hooked (LOL) on supplying the NHS, we could start using our leverage on their entire cash flow to make them play nice.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355
Sounds good from labour. Now they need to do something about second home owners, holiday lets and Airbnb’s that blight many rural and coastal communities pricing locals and workers needed locally out. Giving people priority on a new build in Blackburn or Stoke May be good for that area but labour needs to do much much more.
Not really.
The six month priority does not do much. If a developer can get £320k in 6 months or £300k from a first time buyer now, they will generally wait out the 6 months.
And as for restricting foreign purchasers in new developments, setting it at 50% is surely a piss take? For a few developments it might be better than the status quo but try selling "we will look after you, only half the new homes we are building are going to rich foreigners" on the doorstep.
The only problem with the "Rich Foreigners stealing our homes" thing is what are they doing with them?
IIRC occupancy in London is north of 98% - yup, 2% of homes are unoccupied. When you start including build work etc. it is pretty clear that the towers of empty flats thing is a myth.
It will be very different in recent new builds in central London than the whole housing stock in greater London. The higher the price the more likely it is to be used as an empty store of asset value away from whichever country they earnt it in/stole it from.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
Tbh Philip, I rate most of what you post on here and although our political views differ markedly, I generally enjoy the challenge your well-argued points deliver to my world view. It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. However, you're flogging a dead horse on this one.
To answer your specific point: 'It's low wage open immigration that has ended' - it's the ending of low wage open immigration that's causing the current crisis.
Absolutely it is I agree.
Which is a good thing. An end to low wages is literally what people voted for.
Why are you upset about the end of low wages?
For me, this was one of the two* potentially legitimate concerns about free movement and one positive that might come from Brexit.
However, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Great for HGV drivers, possibly (as long as the market doesn't adjust to other forms of distibution, more rail etc actually cutting demand and wages longer term). Possibly good for other jobs that have to be here - supermarket staff etc. Of course, higher wages in these sectors also mean higher food prices, which are a greater share of the income of those on lower incomes. Does your average person in, say, the lowest 10% of income pre-Brexit end up better off in buying power? I don't know.
There are also those jobs that can move easily. Call centres, some manufacturing. There's a limit on higher wages there due to lack of competition for jobs as, at some point, it becomes moe economical to move the jobs to where the workers are available at lower prices, particularly if you can't import the workers instead. Those people will probably not get big pay rises (some might move to higher paid jobs in e.g. HGV driving, but not everyone) but the cost of food etc will increase.
Overall, does reducing cheap labour supply make things better or worse on average for those on lowest incomes before Brexit? I don't know. Some winners for sure, some losers too. For some of these jobs a similar effect could have been achieved through an increase in minimum wage, but with similar pros and cons (other jobs, the pay is going up much higher/was already above minimum wage so less relevant).
*The other being pressure on services in some areas, although that only changes if people leave in large numbers. Given some of those leaving are providing the services (e.g. NHS) it doesn't necessarily follow that pressures ease - and government could have done more to address these issues in affected areas anyway.
One issue is the lack of investment in productivity over a number of years. Hands were literally cheaper than machines.
The classic that I remember is from the Economist in the 1980s. They asked why, since a German steelworker cost 20x as much (literally) than an Indian steelworker, there were any German steelworks.
The answer was that the German steelworker produced 21x steel (IIRC).
So the German worker was cheaper.
This is true across a range of industries - a combination of investment in productivity by the company and a decent social/legal/infrastructure framework creates a level of productivity that supports the higher wages.
For example, I worked for a company with software development teams around the world. Since they were working on bit of the same system, the comparison was almost perfectly fair. India was the most expensive place to get software developed - due to productivity. London was second cheapest....
But that does raise the question about why Switzerland - which also has FoM with the EU - has had no problems at all investing in technology and increasing productivity.
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
That is quite a remarkable piece of autobiographical writing.
Actually his speech was quite entertaining and well received
‘We go live to Big_G Towers in North Wales for a reaction..’
A modest residence:
Wales as part of (I think) Yorkshire? I can live with that.
Does Scotland want to be part of Yorkshire as well?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
You did not say Europe is half a million truckers short and I would rather listen to truckers who do the job to be honest
Why do you think there are no fuel shortages and empty shelves in the EU, Mr G?
I've experienced no fuel shortages or empty shelves here at all.
I'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
The issue we have is that it's clear there are intermittent and store / petrol station specific issues.
Yet because a lot of people on here have not seen any problems they don't believe there is an issue.
It reminds me of the 8 year old who did a scientific experiment to confirm if the tooth fairy existed. He proved that the fairy didn't exist and then discovered his parents no longer gave him money for lost teeth.
And do you think those issues are being reported proportionately?
I have friends, family and colleagues all over the country. Not a single one has raised this as an issue - the only ones that do are the usual FBPE suspects on Twitter and the media hacks that retweet them, so I take it with a massive pinch of salt.
The Government and supermarket chains are talking about challenges in some areas but it's far from the national crisis it's made out to be.
I should also be clear, the Aldi issues aren't within Aldi, it's missed / delayed deliveries to the warehouse that is the issue there (the warehouse is 1/2 mile from our local Aldi which is the regional flagship store for the regional head office at the warehouse).
Out of curiosity @eek , what is your assessment of the buy to let opportunities in Darlington? What's going on with those streets full of 60k houses next to the railway station?
I think this is Boris’s Thatcher moment but as champion of the left rather than the right.
The Trots took the economy to the brink by trying to choke off the lifeblood of the economy. Thatcher stood firm and found a way to break their resistance without giving them what they wanted.
This time it’s the entrepreneurial class deliberately taking the economy to the brink, in the hope the government folds and gives them back cheap foreign labour.
Boris should use emergency legislation to enforce higher minimum wages and working conditions for hauliers and tear up some of the red tape.
It feeds into Mark Blythe’s (Brown Uni) general narrative, where the power swung too far in favour of workers post WW2 but it’s now swung too far towards the capital owning class.
This happened largely because Thatcher and Reagan completely defeated organised labour, with no negotiated settlement. They were the key players in this exaggerated and excessive process, and their supporters hatched Brexit, in the early 1990's, really to tilt that balance even further. It was the era of Jacque Delors, and Europe being seen as a socialist supporter of labour rights, and thus also a drag on growth, by the British and American Right. The Referendum Party's plutocratic manifesto in this area was already beginning to take shape by the mid-'90s.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
And there's likely to be a limit to even how much help even in the short term getting more cheap migrants to keep the wages down would help.
What's to stop thousands of migrant workers already in the UK from getting better paid jobs in other countries if their pay is held down by getting thousands of cheaper migrant workers ?
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
Likewise in agriculture.
The mantra of fruit and veg farmers in southern England has evolved since the 1990s:
The locals aren't willing to do the work so get some Northerners to do it. The Northerners aren't willing to do the work so get some Irish to do it. The Irish aren't willing to do the work so get some Portuguese to do it. The Portuguese aren't willing to do the work so get some Poles to do it. The Poles aren't willing to do the work so get some Romanians to do it. The Romanians aren't willing to do the work so get some Bulgarian to do it. The Bulgarians aren't willing to do the work so get some Ukrainians to do it.
I believe they're now trying to get workers from Central Asia.
Well it might give the Afghan refugees a job opportunity but the model is fundamentally flawed.
Aren’t many of the afghan refugees intelligent and educated people. They are more likely to want to do something a little more than that.
That depends which refugees. The people who are willing and able to make it to the UK are more likely to be educated, but the much greater numbers of poorer Afghans are living in Pakistan and Iran, and presumably there will be more fleeing from the Taliban in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. So on @another_richard 's scheme where everybody is shuffling over one country as part of a great chain of global migration triggered by a fruit-picking vacancy in Diss, there's no particular skills mismatch to worry about.
It is very good that wages are rising albeit that creates inflationary pressure as discussed yesterday on here in the morning and, it turns out, by the Bank of England in the afternoon (PB leading the way).
At some point the buck has to stop and rising wages and prices and wages and prices become a problem for the country in all sorts of ways that we won't repeat. The BoE is worried about it which seems a reasonably independent institution.
But the issue that policy makers have to grapple with, and the comparison is with the supermarkets and their treatment of their suppliers, is whether the benefit to the whole country (via lower or suppressed wages/prices) is more important than the factor inputs (ie wages in this case) being kept low.
No rising wages are not a problem, they're an entirely good thing so long as the market can afford them.
For too many years people have claimed that rising prices are a good thing, while rising wages are a bad one. That misrepresentation has to be reversed.
Rising wages lead to rising prices. Rising prices can be a problem. Productivity gains are what can break the cycle.
Except that rising prices has been something we've been putting up with in this country for decades. Prices have been soaring for certain things.
Rising prices aren't a problem so long as they're rising slower than wages. When prices are rising faster than wages (as has happened) then that's a problem.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
That is quite a remarkable piece of autobiographical writing.
Actually his speech was quite entertaining and well received
‘We go live to Big_G Towers in North Wales for a reaction..’
Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355
Sounds good from labour. Now they need to do something about second home owners, holiday lets and Airbnb’s that blight many rural and coastal communities pricing locals and workers needed locally out. Giving people priority on a new build in Blackburn or Stoke May be good for that area but labour needs to do much much more.
Not really.
The six month priority does not do much. If a developer can get £320k in 6 months or £300k from a first time buyer now, they will generally wait out the 6 months.
And as for restricting foreign purchasers in new developments, setting it at 50% is surely a piss take? For a few developments it might be better than the status quo but try selling "we will look after you, only half the new homes we are building are going to rich foreigners" on the doorstep.
The only problem with the "Rich Foreigners stealing our homes" thing is what are they doing with them?
IIRC occupancy in London is north of 98% - yup, 2% of homes are unoccupied. When you start including build work etc. it is pretty clear that the towers of empty flats thing is a myth.
Aren't the empty homes in London concentrated in the posho bits ?
Bishops Avenue, Mayfair mansions, £50m flats in the Shard etc ?
They are a tiny, tiny issue.
The reason it gets brought up, is that people want to solve the housing price crisis. But they don't want more houses (near them). So "brownfield!", "foreigners buy our houses and ship them to China!", "Second homes!" etc etc
While some of these effect parts of the country, the problem is simply that the supply of housing has not kept up with the number of people.
Which is why in my part of London, people are paying £1m plus to live in houses built as company houses by a brickworks in Edwardian times. Not mansions.....
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
Likewise in agriculture.
The mantra of fruit and veg farmers in southern England has evolved since the 1990s:
The locals aren't willing to do the work so get some Northerners to do it. The Northerners aren't willing to do the work so get some Irish to do it. The Irish aren't willing to do the work so get some Portuguese to do it. The Portuguese aren't willing to do the work so get some Poles to do it. The Poles aren't willing to do the work so get some Romanians to do it. The Romanians aren't willing to do the work so get some Bulgarian to do it. The Bulgarians aren't willing to do the work so get some Ukrainians to do it.
I believe they're now trying to get workers from Central Asia.
Well it might give the Afghan refugees a job opportunity but the model is fundamentally flawed.
Afghans need jobs and the farming jobs there are mainly opium which is generally frowned on so this sounds like a pretty great model? What's the problem with it specifically? As far as I can see everyone gets their fruit and veg, everyone involved gets a better job, and the only thing that might see production drop is opium, which is already seeing lower demand because it's getting out-competed by fentanyl.
The more is fundamentally flawed because you need ever poorer countries to source your labour supply from.
At the end of the chain you just stop farming opium, no? Fentanyl is extremely efficient to produce, the world isn't going to run out of drugs.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
Tbh Philip, I rate most of what you post on here and although our political views differ markedly, I generally enjoy the challenge your well-argued points deliver to my world view. It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. However, you're flogging a dead horse on this one.
To answer your specific point: 'It's low wage open immigration that has ended' - it's the ending of low wage open immigration that's causing the current crisis.
Absolutely it is I agree.
Which is a good thing. An end to low wages is literally what people voted for.
Why are you upset about the end of low wages?
For me, this was one of the two* potentially legitimate concerns about free movement and one positive that might come from Brexit.
However, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Great for HGV drivers, possibly (as long as the market doesn't adjust to other forms of distibution, more rail etc actually cutting demand and wages longer term). Possibly good for other jobs that have to be here - supermarket staff etc. Of course, higher wages in these sectors also mean higher food prices, which are a greater share of the income of those on lower incomes. Does your average person in, say, the lowest 10% of income pre-Brexit end up better off in buying power? I don't know.
There are also those jobs that can move easily. Call centres, some manufacturing. There's a limit on higher wages there due to lack of competition for jobs as, at some point, it becomes moe economical to move the jobs to where the workers are available at lower prices, particularly if you can't import the workers instead. Those people will probably not get big pay rises (some might move to higher paid jobs in e.g. HGV driving, but not everyone) but the cost of food etc will increase.
Overall, does reducing cheap labour supply make things better or worse on average for those on lowest incomes before Brexit? I don't know. Some winners for sure, some losers too. For some of these jobs a similar effect could have been achieved through an increase in minimum wage, but with similar pros and cons (other jobs, the pay is going up much higher/was already above minimum wage so less relevant).
*The other being pressure on services in some areas, although that only changes if people leave in large numbers. Given some of those leaving are providing the services (e.g. NHS) it doesn't necessarily follow that pressures ease - and government could have done more to address these issues in affected areas anyway.
One issue is the lack of investment in productivity over a number of years. Hands were literally cheaper than machines.
The classic that I remember is from the Economist in the 1980s. They asked why, since a German steelworker cost 20x as much (literally) than an Indian steelworker, there were any German steelworks.
The answer was that the German steelworker produced 21x steel (IIRC).
So the German worker was cheaper.
This is true across a range of industries - a combination of investment in productivity by the company and a decent social/legal/infrastructure framework creates a level of productivity that supports the higher wages.
For example, I worked for a company with software development teams around the world. Since they were working on bit of the same system, the comparison was almost perfectly fair. India was the most expensive place to get software developed - due to productivity. London was second cheapest....
Yep, so maybe we get productivity increases due to lack of cheap labour. Good thing, in general. But if you find a way of dealing with 25% fewer workers on 20% higher pay (or whatever), that's great for the 75% of workers still employed, but not for the 25% looking for new jobs. Or, indeed, it still might be great in the long term if it boosts the economy and creates more jobs, but there is short term pain.
The UK, as a whole, has done well out of transitioning to a more service-focused economy, but it certainly hasn't been good for everyone.
Of course, if you fail to raise productivity then someone else will and you lose out anyway.
My point was really that higher wages are good for those getting the wages, perhaps good for everyone long term, but it's simplistic to not recognise that there will be short term (maybe medium-long term) losers too.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
Five real benefits:
1: We can elect the government that sets our laws - and kick out the bastards if they do things we dislike. 2: We can control the money that we spend rather than having over £350m a week gross being sent into Europe, of which we only got some of it back and not all spent in the UK how we wanted it spent. 3: We can cherrypick and have a free trade, zero-tariff, zero-quota agreement with Europe and sign free trade deals with any other nations we choose to do so too such as the CPTPP etc potentially. The CPTPP if we join it will be even bigger than the EU and would come on top of our free trade agreement with Europe. 4: We can control our own natural resources as we choose to do so. 5: We can control the immigration system so that we can get high skilled, high wage migrants who can contribute to society instead of low skilled, low wage migrants who deflated our economy while increasing pressure on housing and services.
If you want those 5 summarised in one word each: Laws, Money, Trade, Fish and Borders - the issues we've been debating for years now!
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355
Sounds good from labour. Now they need to do something about second home owners, holiday lets and Airbnb’s that blight many rural and coastal communities pricing locals and workers needed locally out. Giving people priority on a new build in Blackburn or Stoke May be good for that area but labour needs to do much much more.
Not really.
The six month priority does not do much. If a developer can get £320k in 6 months or £300k from a first time buyer now, they will generally wait out the 6 months.
And as for restricting foreign purchasers in new developments, setting it at 50% is surely a piss take? For a few developments it might be better than the status quo but try selling "we will look after you, only half the new homes we are building are going to rich foreigners" on the doorstep.
The only problem with the "Rich Foreigners stealing our homes" thing is what are they doing with them?
IIRC occupancy in London is north of 98% - yup, 2% of homes are unoccupied. When you start including build work etc. it is pretty clear that the towers of empty flats thing is a myth.
Aren't the empty homes in London concentrated in the posho bits ?
Bishops Avenue, Mayfair mansions, £50m flats in the Shard etc ?
They are a tiny, tiny issue.
The reason it gets brought up, is that people want to solve the housing price crisis. But they don't want more houses (near them). So "brownfield!", "foreigners buy our houses and ship them to China!", "Second homes!" etc etc
While some of these effect parts of the country, the problem is simply that the supply of housing has not kept up with the number of people.
Which is why in my part of London, people are paying £1m plus to live in houses built as company houses by a brickworks in Edwardian times. Not mansions.....
The econometricians ascribe house prices to (in order)
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
Tbh Philip, I rate most of what you post on here and although our political views differ markedly, I generally enjoy the challenge your well-argued points deliver to my world view. It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. However, you're flogging a dead horse on this one.
To answer your specific point: 'It's low wage open immigration that has ended' - it's the ending of low wage open immigration that's causing the current crisis.
Absolutely it is I agree.
Which is a good thing. An end to low wages is literally what people voted for.
Why are you upset about the end of low wages?
For me, this was one of the two* potentially legitimate concerns about free movement and one positive that might come from Brexit.
However, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Great for HGV drivers, possibly (as long as the market doesn't adjust to other forms of distibution, more rail etc actually cutting demand and wages longer term). Possibly good for other jobs that have to be here - supermarket staff etc. Of course, higher wages in these sectors also mean higher food prices, which are a greater share of the income of those on lower incomes. Does your average person in, say, the lowest 10% of income pre-Brexit end up better off in buying power? I don't know.
There are also those jobs that can move easily. Call centres, some manufacturing. There's a limit on higher wages there due to lack of competition for jobs as, at some point, it becomes moe economical to move the jobs to where the workers are available at lower prices, particularly if you can't import the workers instead. Those people will probably not get big pay rises (some might move to higher paid jobs in e.g. HGV driving, but not everyone) but the cost of food etc will increase.
Overall, does reducing cheap labour supply make things better or worse on average for those on lowest incomes before Brexit? I don't know. Some winners for sure, some losers too. For some of these jobs a similar effect could have been achieved through an increase in minimum wage, but with similar pros and cons (other jobs, the pay is going up much higher/was already above minimum wage so less relevant).
*The other being pressure on services in some areas, although that only changes if people leave in large numbers. Given some of those leaving are providing the services (e.g. NHS) it doesn't necessarily follow that pressures ease - and government could have done more to address these issues in affected areas anyway.
A lot of firms that outsourced call centres have brought things back to the UK as outsourcing didn't end up the way they hoped it would.
I did love the fact that for about 3 years the customer service of Plusnet (BT's cheap sister brand) was based in the UK while BT desperately worked to extract themselves from overseas sites and return the work to the UK.
Yep, the super-cheap send it to India or wherever option didn't really work out for a lot of companies. But there are plenty of call centres in e.g. Ireland (or else a lot of people with Irish accents at UK call centres). So there are still options to shift some of those jobs.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is also what the Daily Mail constituency is beginning to notice too.
Agree that Brexit and returns sharpens it for us (20% of problem). But also interestingly Poland and Germany are also mentioned. Did our Poles go back to Spain?
The most heavily affected European countries are Poland, the UK and Germany. The UK is in a particularly difficult position as it is not only grappling with Brexit, but it also saw many European workers leave over the course of the pandemic, as fears over lockdowns grew.
One point not mentioned. What happens with mutual recognition?
Does our semi-isolation from the EU market mean that our newly trained drivers have to stay UK-based?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
Tbh Philip, I rate most of what you post on here and although our political views differ markedly, I generally enjoy the challenge your well-argued points deliver to my world view. It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. However, you're flogging a dead horse on this one.
To answer your specific point: 'It's low wage open immigration that has ended' - it's the ending of low wage open immigration that's causing the current crisis.
Absolutely it is I agree.
Which is a good thing. An end to low wages is literally what people voted for.
Why are you upset about the end of low wages?
For me, this was one of the two* potentially legitimate concerns about free movement and one positive that might come from Brexit.
However, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Great for HGV drivers, possibly (as long as the market doesn't adjust to other forms of distibution, more rail etc actually cutting demand and wages longer term). Possibly good for other jobs that have to be here - supermarket staff etc. Of course, higher wages in these sectors also mean higher food prices, which are a greater share of the income of those on lower incomes. Does your average person in, say, the lowest 10% of income pre-Brexit end up better off in buying power? I don't know.
There are also those jobs that can move easily. Call centres, some manufacturing. There's a limit on higher wages there due to lack of competition for jobs as, at some point, it becomes moe economical to move the jobs to where the workers are available at lower prices, particularly if you can't import the workers instead. Those people will probably not get big pay rises (some might move to higher paid jobs in e.g. HGV driving, but not everyone) but the cost of food etc will increase.
Overall, does reducing cheap labour supply make things better or worse on average for those on lowest incomes before Brexit? I don't know. Some winners for sure, some losers too. For some of these jobs a similar effect could have been achieved through an increase in minimum wage, but with similar pros and cons (other jobs, the pay is going up much higher/was already above minimum wage so less relevant).
*The other being pressure on services in some areas, although that only changes if people leave in large numbers. Given some of those leaving are providing the services (e.g. NHS) it doesn't necessarily follow that pressures ease - and government could have done more to address these issues in affected areas anyway.
One issue is the lack of investment in productivity over a number of years. Hands were literally cheaper than machines.
The classic that I remember is from the Economist in the 1980s. They asked why, since a German steelworker cost 20x as much (literally) than an Indian steelworker, there were any German steelworks.
The answer was that the German steelworker produced 21x steel (IIRC).
So the German worker was cheaper.
This is true across a range of industries - a combination of investment in productivity by the company and a decent social/legal/infrastructure framework creates a level of productivity that supports the higher wages.
For example, I worked for a company with software development teams around the world. Since they were working on bit of the same system, the comparison was almost perfectly fair. India was the most expensive place to get software developed - due to productivity. London was second cheapest....
Yep, so maybe we get productivity increases due to lack of cheap labour. Good thing, in general. But if you find a way of dealing with 25% fewer workers on 20% higher pay (or whatever), that's great for the 75% of workers still employed, but not for the 25% looking for new jobs. Or, indeed, it still might be great in the long term if it boosts the economy and creates more jobs, but there is short term pain.
The UK, as a whole, has done well out of transitioning to a more service-focused economy, but it certainly hasn't been good for everyone.
Of course, if you fail to raise productivity then someone else will and you lose out anyway.
My point was really that higher wages are good for those getting the wages, perhaps good for everyone long term, but it's simplistic to not recognise that there will be short term (maybe medium-long term) losers too.
The two biggest losers are people from Eastern Europe who can't come here and gain a minimum wage job and Universal Credit and Housing Allowance anymore . . . and the employers who would rather employ them than pay people a living wage.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
And there's likely to be a limit to even how much help even in the short term getting more cheap migrants to keep the wages down would help.
What's to stop thousands of migrant workers already in the UK from getting better paid jobs in other countries if their pay is held down by getting thousands of cheaper migrant workers ?
From what I have seen the conditions in the HGV trade are a serious problem. It seems that the supply chain has got used to crapping on HGV drivers - ever more impossible schedules, hurry-hurry-wait etc. The wages were the icing on the shit cake.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
Likewise in agriculture.
The mantra of fruit and veg farmers in southern England has evolved since the 1990s:
The locals aren't willing to do the work so get some Northerners to do it. The Northerners aren't willing to do the work so get some Irish to do it. The Irish aren't willing to do the work so get some Portuguese to do it. The Portuguese aren't willing to do the work so get some Poles to do it. The Poles aren't willing to do the work so get some Romanians to do it. The Romanians aren't willing to do the work so get some Bulgarian to do it. The Bulgarians aren't willing to do the work so get some Ukrainians to do it.
I believe they're now trying to get workers from Central Asia.
Well it might give the Afghan refugees a job opportunity but the model is fundamentally flawed.
Afghans need jobs and the farming jobs there are mainly opium which is generally frowned on so this sounds like a pretty great model? What's the problem with it specifically? As far as I can see everyone gets their fruit and veg, everyone involved gets a better job, and the only thing that might see production drop is opium, which is already seeing lower demand because it's getting out-competed by fentanyl.
The more is fundamentally flawed because you need ever poorer countries to source your labour supply from.
At the end of the chain you just stop farming opium, no? Fentanyl is extremely efficient to produce, the world isn't going to run out of drugs.
The Taliban are a nightmare for Western drug issues for exactly that reason - they forbid opium farming, fentanyl becomes more competitive than heroin and is a much, much more dangerous drug.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is also what the Daily Mail constituency is beginning to notice too.
Agree that Brexit and returns sharpens it for us (20% of problem). But also interestingly for Poland and Germany. Did our Poles go back to Spain?
The most heavily affected European countries are Poland, the UK and Germany. The UK is in a particularly difficult position as it is not only grappling with Brexit, but it also saw many European workers leave over the course of the pandemic, as fears over lockdowns grew.
One point not mentioned. What happens with mutual recognition?
Does our semi-isolation from the EU market mean that our newly trained drivers have to stay UK-based?
There's no evidence of shortages in any of those countries in that report, as far as I've read. Because of the fluid nature of mobility in the EU, driver and container shortages aren't the same as supply shortages.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
You did not say Europe is half a million truckers short and I would rather listen to truckers who do the job to be honest
Why do you think there are no fuel shortages and empty shelves in the EU, Mr G?
I've experienced no fuel shortages or empty shelves here at all.
I'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
The issue we have is that it's clear there are intermittent and store / petrol station specific issues.
Yet because a lot of people on here have not seen any problems they don't believe there is an issue.
It reminds me of the 8 year old who did a scientific experiment to confirm if the tooth fairy existed. He proved that the fairy didn't exist and then discovered his parents no longer gave him money for lost teeth.
And do you think those issues are being reported proportionately?
I have friends, family and colleagues all over the country. Not a single one has raised this as an issue - the only ones that do are the usual FBPE suspects on Twitter and the media hacks that retweet them, so I take it with a massive pinch of salt.
The Government and supermarket chains are talking about challenges in some areas but it's far from the national crisis it's made out to be.
I should also be clear, the Aldi issues aren't within Aldi, it's missed / delayed deliveries to the warehouse that is the issue there (the warehouse is 1/2 mile from our local Aldi which is the regional flagship store for the regional head office at the warehouse).
Out of curiosity @eek , what is your assessment of the buy to let opportunities in Darlington? What's going on with those streets full of 60k houses next to the railway station?
Not the area I would personally be buying in - far too much chance of getting problem tenants (the local primary school there has the regional lead for traveller children if that helps demonstrate).
Another issue is that a lot of the buildings are now time served, there is nothing immediately wrong with them but 30+ years of minimal care means there is a lot of stuff that is hidden but could go wrong.
Also £400 a month doesn't go far when your tenant leaves with the boiler... It's not an area I would buy to let in without personal oversight (and there are easier ways for me to earn £4000 a year).
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
So you're repeating the lie? Have you no integrity?
If he said that as part of Vote Leave (he did not) then on what date did he say it?
Look Philip, You´ve been caught out. The evidence is clear. You can keep spinning or accept that you are embarassing yourself.
The evidence is clear, he didn't say it. A known liar fabricated that video and put a false caption on it and was called out on the BBC for lying.
But its good to see you have no integrity. If you honestly think Daniel Hannan as part of Vote Leave as captioned said those words during the Referendum then please quote on what date he said it so the full thing can be seen in context.
But you can't. As it is a lie. That video is a bullshit fabrication.
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
That is quite a remarkable piece of autobiographical writing.
Actually his speech was quite entertaining and well received
‘We go live to Big_G Towers in North Wales for a reaction..’
A modest residence:
Wales as part of (I think) Yorkshire? I can live with that.
Does Scotland want to be part of Yorkshire as well?
Waiting staff receive 100% of their tips from today
Excellent news and quite right
I wouldn't put anyone off working as waiting staff at a place you get tips. My wife did it for a spell at a fish and chip restaurant with a generally older clientele. Was minimum wage but could almost double that with tips.
It is very good that wages are rising albeit that creates inflationary pressure as discussed yesterday on here in the morning and, it turns out, by the Bank of England in the afternoon (PB leading the way).
At some point the buck has to stop and rising wages and prices and wages and prices become a problem for the country in all sorts of ways that we won't repeat. The BoE is worried about it which seems a reasonably independent institution.
But the issue that policy makers have to grapple with, and the comparison is with the supermarkets and their treatment of their suppliers, is whether the benefit to the whole country (via lower or suppressed wages/prices) is more important than the factor inputs (ie wages in this case) being kept low.
No rising wages are not a problem, they're an entirely good thing so long as the market can afford them.
For too many years people have claimed that rising prices are a good thing, while rising wages are a bad one. That misrepresentation has to be reversed.
Rising wages lead to rising prices. Rising prices can be a problem. Productivity gains are what can break the cycle.
Except that rising prices has been something we've been putting up with in this country for decades. Prices have been soaring for certain things.
Rising prices aren't a problem so long as they're rising slower than wages. When prices are rising faster than wages (as has happened) then that's a problem.
Its great to see a reversal.
We have wage growth of around 7% and current expected inflation of around 4%. As a policy maker would you be nervous?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
You did not say Europe is half a million truckers short and I would rather listen to truckers who do the job to be honest
Why do you think there are no fuel shortages and empty shelves in the EU, Mr G?
I've experienced no fuel shortages or empty shelves here at all.
I'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
The issue we have is that it's clear there are intermittent and store / petrol station specific issues.
Yet because a lot of people on here have not seen any problems they don't believe there is an issue.
It reminds me of the 8 year old who did a scientific experiment to confirm if the tooth fairy existed. He proved that the fairy didn't exist and then discovered his parents no longer gave him money for lost teeth.
And do you think those issues are being reported proportionately?
I have friends, family and colleagues all over the country. Not a single one has raised this as an issue - the only ones that do are the usual FBPE suspects on Twitter and the media hacks that retweet them, so I take it with a massive pinch of salt.
The Government and supermarket chains are talking about challenges in some areas but it's far from the national crisis it's made out to be.
I should also be clear, the Aldi issues aren't within Aldi, it's missed / delayed deliveries to the warehouse that is the issue there (the warehouse is 1/2 mile from our local Aldi which is the regional flagship store for the regional head office at the warehouse).
Out of curiosity @eek , what is your assessment of the buy to let opportunities in Darlington? What's going on with those streets full of 60k houses next to the railway station?
Not the area I would personally be buying in - far too much chance of getting problem tenants (the local primary school there has the regional lead for traveller children if that helps demonstrate).
Another issue is that a lot of the buildings are now time served, there is nothing immediately wrong with them but 30+ years of minimal care means there is a lot of stuff that is hidden but could go wrong.
Also £400 a month doesn't go far when your tenant leaves with the boiler... It's not an area I would buy to let in without personal oversight (and there are easier ways for me to earn £4000 a year).
To add - the £35k refurb would be a better option rather than spending £60k upfront. At least then you would know all the wiring, heating, windows were replaced in 2021 so good for another 10 to 60 years. (would buy it personally as it's end of terrace but its more justifiable than some other options).
Interesting a new agent is trying to see if he can increase prices, a house near us has come up at 20% more than the last sale price and it's a smaller property. Will be interesting to see if it sells and introduces more sensible prices.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
"Older industries, too, have revived as energy prices have fallen back to global levels" Still, this is June 2025, so we had better wait and see...
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
Likewise in agriculture.
The mantra of fruit and veg farmers in southern England has evolved since the 1990s:
The locals aren't willing to do the work so get some Northerners to do it. The Northerners aren't willing to do the work so get some Irish to do it. The Irish aren't willing to do the work so get some Portuguese to do it. The Portuguese aren't willing to do the work so get some Poles to do it. The Poles aren't willing to do the work so get some Romanians to do it. The Romanians aren't willing to do the work so get some Bulgarian to do it. The Bulgarians aren't willing to do the work so get some Ukrainians to do it.
I believe they're now trying to get workers from Central Asia.
Well it might give the Afghan refugees a job opportunity but the model is fundamentally flawed.
Afghans need jobs and the farming jobs there are mainly opium which is generally frowned on so this sounds like a pretty great model? What's the problem with it specifically? As far as I can see everyone gets their fruit and veg, everyone involved gets a better job, and the only thing that might see production drop is opium, which is already seeing lower demand because it's getting out-competed by fentanyl.
The more is fundamentally flawed because you need ever poorer countries to source your labour supply from.
At the end of the chain you just stop farming opium, no? Fentanyl is extremely efficient to produce, the world isn't going to run out of drugs.
The Taliban are a nightmare for Western drug issues for exactly that reason - they forbid opium farming, fentanyl becomes more competitive than heroin and is a much, much more dangerous drug.
Organic* opium/heroin overdoses have been falling in the US, even as overall opiate deaths have been rising. Traditional heroin has been priced out the market by fentanyl.
* No, not free range, organic, no fertilizers. Organic, as in not synthetic.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit
No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
Likewise in agriculture.
The mantra of fruit and veg farmers in southern England has evolved since the 1990s:
The locals aren't willing to do the work so get some Northerners to do it. The Northerners aren't willing to do the work so get some Irish to do it. The Irish aren't willing to do the work so get some Portuguese to do it. The Portuguese aren't willing to do the work so get some Poles to do it. The Poles aren't willing to do the work so get some Romanians to do it. The Romanians aren't willing to do the work so get some Bulgarian to do it. The Bulgarians aren't willing to do the work so get some Ukrainians to do it.
I believe they're now trying to get workers from Central Asia.
Well it might give the Afghan refugees a job opportunity but the model is fundamentally flawed.
Afghans need jobs and the farming jobs there are mainly opium which is generally frowned on so this sounds like a pretty great model? What's the problem with it specifically? As far as I can see everyone gets their fruit and veg, everyone involved gets a better job, and the only thing that might see production drop is opium, which is already seeing lower demand because it's getting out-competed by fentanyl.
The more is fundamentally flawed because you need ever poorer countries to source your labour supply from.
At the end of the chain you just stop farming opium, no? Fentanyl is extremely efficient to produce, the world isn't going to run out of drugs.
The Taliban are a nightmare for Western drug issues for exactly that reason - they forbid opium farming, fentanyl becomes more competitive than heroin and is a much, much more dangerous drug.
The way I understood it was that the Taliban aren't really stopping opium farming (except for show, and allegedly they did it to pump the price up at one point) and the shift to fentanyl is mainly demand-driven.
Anyhow if the world feels like it needs more opium production but poor people who would gladly take better-paying jobs have somehow become a scare resource, I'm sure developed countries could offer them some tech to increase the efficiency of their farms.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
Five real benefits:
1: We can elect the government that sets our laws - and kick out the bastards if they do things we dislike. 2: We can control the money that we spend rather than having over £350m a week gross being sent into Europe, of which we only got some of it back and not all spent in the UK how we wanted it spent. 3: We can cherrypick and have a free trade, zero-tariff, zero-quota agreement with Europe and sign free trade deals with any other nations we choose to do so too such as the CPTPP etc potentially. The CPTPP if we join it will be even bigger than the EU and would come on top of our free trade agreement with Europe. 4: We can control our own natural resources as we choose to do so. 5: We can control the immigration system so that we can get high skilled, high wage migrants who can contribute to society instead of low skilled, low wage migrants who deflated our economy while increasing pressure on housing and services.
If you want those 5 summarised in one word each: Laws, Money, Trade, Fish and Borders - the issues we've been debating for years now!
1) No change 2) Irrelevant, we paid for market access 3) Pie in the Sky as Usual (Do you believe in Father Christmas still?) 4)Fish?..hahahahahahahahaha 5)Paper tiger. Immigration was never a problem. We used to screw them by high tax, extra NHS fees, no access to in work benefits, it was our fault we never used the money to improve services for workshy Brits who never contributed anything anyway.
Not wishing to prolong yesterdays discussion about the buy to let market in Darlington; but I did another rightmove search and found another house, 3 bed, EPC rating C for £52k.
With regard to PB political bias, I don't really see any. My concern is that it just seems to skew towards older people, ie - retired people and those with adult children. Some of us are certainly in our 30s and 40s (like me), but it seems like there are very few young people. In gender terms, it seems to be quite male dominated; although it is difficult to say with certainty. Maybe this is inevitable in a forum about politics, I don't know.
SFAICS anyone can join, anyone can contribute so the nature of the thing is controlled only by those who choose to contribute and those who choose not.
It's political (of course) and most people don't join parties or get involved in much political discussion except with a small circle.
You don't involve with politics at any level unless you are prepared for: irrational arguments, unreasonable rudeness, dogmatism, cliche, groupthink, unreasonable rejection and dislike, ignoring vital questions, virtue signalling, hypocrisy and unwillingness to admit to being wrong. Try the House of Commons.
A few of those still standing at that point (not many, maybe mostly older) and don't want fame or a career out of politics, but perhaps made a few bob out of the C & A by election, contribute to PB. Personally I am grateful to them
It is very good that wages are rising albeit that creates inflationary pressure as discussed yesterday on here in the morning and, it turns out, by the Bank of England in the afternoon (PB leading the way).
At some point the buck has to stop and rising wages and prices and wages and prices become a problem for the country in all sorts of ways that we won't repeat. The BoE is worried about it which seems a reasonably independent institution.
But the issue that policy makers have to grapple with, and the comparison is with the supermarkets and their treatment of their suppliers, is whether the benefit to the whole country (via lower or suppressed wages/prices) is more important than the factor inputs (ie wages in this case) being kept low.
No rising wages are not a problem, they're an entirely good thing so long as the market can afford them.
For too many years people have claimed that rising prices are a good thing, while rising wages are a bad one. That misrepresentation has to be reversed.
Rising wages lead to rising prices. Rising prices can be a problem. Productivity gains are what can break the cycle.
Except that rising prices has been something we've been putting up with in this country for decades. Prices have been soaring for certain things.
Rising prices aren't a problem so long as they're rising slower than wages. When prices are rising faster than wages (as has happened) then that's a problem.
Its great to see a reversal.
We have wage growth of around 7% and current expected inflation of around 4%. As a policy maker would you be nervous?
No. That's real wage growth of 3% that is absolutely fantastic and should be celebrated.
For too long we've had potentially double-digit price rises and 1% wage rises. That's what I didn't like.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
So you're repeating the lie? Have you no integrity?
If he said that as part of Vote Leave (he did not) then on what date did he say it?
Look Philip, You´ve been caught out. The evidence is clear. You can keep spinning or accept that you are embarassing yourself.
The evidence is clear, he didn't say it. A known liar fabricated that video and put a false caption on it and was called out on the BBC for lying.
But its good to see you have no integrity. If you honestly think Daniel Hannan as part of Vote Leave as captioned said those words during the Referendum then please quote on what date he said it so the full thing can be seen in context.
But you can't. As it is a lie. That video is a bullshit fabrication.
Wait a minute, are you saying that Hannon did not say 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market’ in the face of a video of him saying 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market’?
Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355
Sounds good from labour. Now they need to do something about second home owners, holiday lets and Airbnb’s that blight many rural and coastal communities pricing locals and workers needed locally out. Giving people priority on a new build in Blackburn or Stoke May be good for that area but labour needs to do much much more.
Not really.
The six month priority does not do much. If a developer can get £320k in 6 months or £300k from a first time buyer now, they will generally wait out the 6 months.
And as for restricting foreign purchasers in new developments, setting it at 50% is surely a piss take? For a few developments it might be better than the status quo but try selling "we will look after you, only half the new homes we are building are going to rich foreigners" on the doorstep.
The only problem with the "Rich Foreigners stealing our homes" thing is what are they doing with them?
IIRC occupancy in London is north of 98% - yup, 2% of homes are unoccupied. When you start including build work etc. it is pretty clear that the towers of empty flats thing is a myth.
Aren't the empty homes in London concentrated in the posho bits ?
Bishops Avenue, Mayfair mansions, £50m flats in the Shard etc ?
They are a tiny, tiny issue.
The reason it gets brought up, is that people want to solve the housing price crisis. But they don't want more houses (near them). So "brownfield!", "foreigners buy our houses and ship them to China!", "Second homes!" etc etc
While some of these effect parts of the country, the problem is simply that the supply of housing has not kept up with the number of people.
Which is why in my part of London, people are paying £1m plus to live in houses built as company houses by a brickworks in Edwardian times. Not mansions.....
The econometricians ascribe house prices to (in order)
1. How many people today know how many a "score" is?
2. There are around 8,300 petrol stations in the UK. BP has said "a handful" are affected.
Get a grip.
Is that all? That's only twelve per parliamentary constituency. And that sounds far too few.
Massive numbers of local rural ones have closed in recent years. The time you realise there are not many around if you are somewhere strange in a car, away from the motorway network and don't have access to online information. Suddenly there aren't any. But that doesn't often happen to motorists now.
Consolidation in a low margin high capital industry, helped by improved car economy and longer ranges.
All those rural sites sound ideal for charging stations as part of a mixed business.
Not wishing to prolong yesterdays discussion about the buy to let market in Darlington; but I did another rightmove search and found another house, 3 bed, EPC rating C for £52k.
Even that requires some work to it. Close to the new Treasury Campus though (it would be a less than 5 minute walk).
As I said yesterday £60k is currently the base price in Darlington for this type of property.
The treasury campus is interesting.
From what I hear recruitment is having difficulties - may only be a short term issue but the skills they are looking for don't exist locally...
The plan is great and I will be very local to it when I go back to the office (it's next door) - which given what I'm doing nowadays will mean I will probably be talking to people there an awful lot as since Covid I seem to have switched to labour market / tax compliance work...
Waiting staff receive 100% of their tips from today
Excellent news and quite right
Bad news for kitchen porters.
I fail to see, and always have failed to see, why as a customer I should be expected to top up staff wages. When I ran a shop I didn't expect my staff, who often went over and beyond, to be tipped.
It is very good that wages are rising albeit that creates inflationary pressure as discussed yesterday on here in the morning and, it turns out, by the Bank of England in the afternoon (PB leading the way).
At some point the buck has to stop and rising wages and prices and wages and prices become a problem for the country in all sorts of ways that we won't repeat. The BoE is worried about it which seems a reasonably independent institution.
But the issue that policy makers have to grapple with, and the comparison is with the supermarkets and their treatment of their suppliers, is whether the benefit to the whole country (via lower or suppressed wages/prices) is more important than the factor inputs (ie wages in this case) being kept low.
No rising wages are not a problem, they're an entirely good thing so long as the market can afford them.
For too many years people have claimed that rising prices are a good thing, while rising wages are a bad one. That misrepresentation has to be reversed.
Rising wages lead to rising prices. Rising prices can be a problem. Productivity gains are what can break the cycle.
Except that rising prices has been something we've been putting up with in this country for decades. Prices have been soaring for certain things.
Rising prices aren't a problem so long as they're rising slower than wages. When prices are rising faster than wages (as has happened) then that's a problem.
Its great to see a reversal.
We have wage growth of around 7% and current expected inflation of around 4%. As a policy maker would you be nervous?
No. That's real wage growth of 3% that is absolutely fantastic and should be celebrated.
For too long we've had potentially double-digit price rises and 1% wage rises. That's what I didn't like.
We shall see now long that is sustainable. As I said the BoE is nervous but what do they know.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit
No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit
No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
Genuine question.
Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355
Sounds good from labour. Now they need to do something about second home owners, holiday lets and Airbnb’s that blight many rural and coastal communities pricing locals and workers needed locally out. Giving people priority on a new build in Blackburn or Stoke May be good for that area but labour needs to do much much more.
Not really.
The six month priority does not do much. If a developer can get £320k in 6 months or £300k from a first time buyer now, they will generally wait out the 6 months.
And as for restricting foreign purchasers in new developments, setting it at 50% is surely a piss take? For a few developments it might be better than the status quo but try selling "we will look after you, only half the new homes we are building are going to rich foreigners" on the doorstep.
The only problem with the "Rich Foreigners stealing our homes" thing is what are they doing with them?
IIRC occupancy in London is north of 98% - yup, 2% of homes are unoccupied. When you start including build work etc. it is pretty clear that the towers of empty flats thing is a myth.
Aren't the empty homes in London concentrated in the posho bits ?
Bishops Avenue, Mayfair mansions, £50m flats in the Shard etc ?
They are a tiny, tiny issue.
The reason it gets brought up, is that people want to solve the housing price crisis. But they don't want more houses (near them). So "brownfield!", "foreigners buy our houses and ship them to China!", "Second homes!" etc etc
While some of these effect parts of the country, the problem is simply that the supply of housing has not kept up with the number of people.
Which is why in my part of London, people are paying £1m plus to live in houses built as company houses by a brickworks in Edwardian times. Not mansions.....
The econometricians ascribe house prices to (in order)
Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355
Sounds good from labour. Now they need to do something about second home owners, holiday lets and Airbnb’s that blight many rural and coastal communities pricing locals and workers needed locally out. Giving people priority on a new build in Blackburn or Stoke May be good for that area but labour needs to do much much more.
Not really.
The six month priority does not do much. If a developer can get £320k in 6 months or £300k from a first time buyer now, they will generally wait out the 6 months.
And as for restricting foreign purchasers in new developments, setting it at 50% is surely a piss take? For a few developments it might be better than the status quo but try selling "we will look after you, only half the new homes we are building are going to rich foreigners" on the doorstep.
The only problem with the "Rich Foreigners stealing our homes" thing is what are they doing with them?
IIRC occupancy in London is north of 98% - yup, 2% of homes are unoccupied. When you start including build work etc. it is pretty clear that the towers of empty flats thing is a myth.
Aren't the empty homes in London concentrated in the posho bits ?
Bishops Avenue, Mayfair mansions, £50m flats in the Shard etc ?
They are a tiny, tiny issue.
The reason it gets brought up, is that people want to solve the housing price crisis. But they don't want more houses (near them). So "brownfield!", "foreigners buy our houses and ship them to China!", "Second homes!" etc etc
While some of these effect parts of the country, the problem is simply that the supply of housing has not kept up with the number of people.
Which is why in my part of London, people are paying £1m plus to live in houses built as company houses by a brickworks in Edwardian times. Not mansions.....
The econometricians ascribe house prices to (in order)
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
Tbh Philip, I rate most of what you post on here and although our political views differ markedly, I generally enjoy the challenge your well-argued points deliver to my world view. It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. However, you're flogging a dead horse on this one.
To answer your specific point: 'It's low wage open immigration that has ended' - it's the ending of low wage open immigration that's causing the current crisis.
All EU countries are experiencing shortages. Sure, ours is a bit more pronounced as our market adjusts but it will.
Ours is rather more acute if the overall European shortfall is estimated at 500,000 and our share is estimated north of 100,000, and that's before we get to the self inflicted wound
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Which is fine and I agree with you, but at the same time the government took no steps to get HGV drivers trained up from 2017 onwards and slowly reducing our reliance on Eastern European drivers. Now we're left with a crunch that we didn't need, yes in 6-12 months everything will be resolved because driving test capacity is finally picking up and there's a huge backlog of people waiting to be trained and tested. It doesn't help us with today's problems, of course, but it's another thing we can add to May's terrible government.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit
No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
Genuine question.
Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
So you're repeating the lie? Have you no integrity?
If he said that as part of Vote Leave (he did not) then on what date did he say it?
Look Philip, You´ve been caught out. The evidence is clear. You can keep spinning or accept that you are embarassing yourself.
The evidence is clear, he didn't say it. A known liar fabricated that video and put a false caption on it and was called out on the BBC for lying.
But its good to see you have no integrity. If you honestly think Daniel Hannan as part of Vote Leave as captioned said those words during the Referendum then please quote on what date he said it so the full thing can be seen in context.
But you can't. As it is a lie. That video is a bullshit fabrication.
Now you're going too far.
Consider this, from fullfact.org (who, if nothing else, take time to get this sort of thing right)
For example, Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan said during an interview in 2015 that: "To repeat, absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market".
That is a different stance compared to the main claims of Leave campaigners, and Mr Hannan’s wording isn’t consistent across the interview itself either. Earlier on, he said "absolutely nobody is suggesting we would give up our position in the free market in Europe".
That page links to a video on the YouTube page of Dan Hannan. Who I am sure you aren't claiming is a known liar. (Though his belief that you can have seamless trade without some sort of political and legal system setting and managing the rules doesn't seem to be borne out by reality.)
VL fought a genius campaign that showed just enough ankle to keep EEA types on board. That makes VL weasels and those who fell for it Muppets.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
You did not say Europe is half a million truckers short and I would rather listen to truckers who do the job to be honest
Why do you think there are no fuel shortages and empty shelves in the EU, Mr G?
I've experienced no fuel shortages or empty shelves here at all.
I'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
The issue we have is that it's clear there are intermittent and store / petrol station specific issues.
Yet because a lot of people on here have not seen any problems they don't believe there is an issue.
It reminds me of the 8 year old who did a scientific experiment to confirm if the tooth fairy existed. He proved that the fairy didn't exist and then discovered his parents no longer gave him money for lost teeth.
And do you think those issues are being reported proportionately?
I have friends, family and colleagues all over the country. Not a single one has raised this as an issue - the only ones that do are the usual FBPE suspects on Twitter and the media hacks that retweet them, so I take it with a massive pinch of salt.
The Government and supermarket chains are talking about challenges in some areas but it's far from the national crisis it's made out to be.
I should also be clear, the Aldi issues aren't within Aldi, it's missed / delayed deliveries to the warehouse that is the issue there (the warehouse is 1/2 mile from our local Aldi which is the regional flagship store for the regional head office at the warehouse).
Out of curiosity @eek , what is your assessment of the buy to let opportunities in Darlington? What's going on with those streets full of 60k houses next to the railway station?
Not the area I would personally be buying in - far too much chance of getting problem tenants (the local primary school there has the regional lead for traveller children if that helps demonstrate).
Another issue is that a lot of the buildings are now time served, there is nothing immediately wrong with them but 30+ years of minimal care means there is a lot of stuff that is hidden but could go wrong.
Also £400 a month doesn't go far when your tenant leaves with the boiler... It's not an area I would buy to let in without personal oversight (and there are easier ways for me to earn £4000 a year).
If I was targeting the Treasury clientele I would be spending more for small more modern houses, or things to renovate, perhaps bungalows.
This could easily be a high-management-time option, which will eat your margin, though there may be a short-term appreciation boost in the mix.
Though if you are geared up to a decent size portfolio and target a tenant group such as eg young parents with kids about to start school, you may get good long term tenants with HB. Obvs schools and a safe route thereto are important in that case.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
Five real benefits:
1: We can elect the government that sets our laws - and kick out the bastards if they do things we dislike. 2: We can control the money that we spend rather than having over £350m a week gross being sent into Europe, of which we only got some of it back and not all spent in the UK how we wanted it spent. 3: We can cherrypick and have a free trade, zero-tariff, zero-quota agreement with Europe and sign free trade deals with any other nations we choose to do so too such as the CPTPP etc potentially. The CPTPP if we join it will be even bigger than the EU and would come on top of our free trade agreement with Europe. 4: We can control our own natural resources as we choose to do so. 5: We can control the immigration system so that we can get high skilled, high wage migrants who can contribute to society instead of low skilled, low wage migrants who deflated our economy while increasing pressure on housing and services.
If you want those 5 summarised in one word each: Laws, Money, Trade, Fish and Borders - the issues we've been debating for years now!
1) No change 2) Irrelevant, we paid for market access 3) Pie in the Sky as Usual (Do you believe in Father Christmas still?) 4)Fish?..hahahahahahahahaha 5)Paper tiger. Immigration was never a problem. We used to screw them by high tax, extra NHS fees, no access to in work benefits, it was our fault we never used the money to improve services for workshy Brits who never contributed anything anyway.
1 You are entirely wrong. Lets say I dislike the Clinical Trials Directive and want it changed, I can vote for a government today and that government can change the law. That was not the case pre-Brexit. 2 Its not irrelevant, since the money we paid "for market access" was not going to the UK, it was going elsewhere. Now we get market access for free of charge without any payments. 3 Not pie in the sky and yes absolutely 100% I believe* in Father Christmas 4 Yeah I don't care about it either but others do 5 Not true. Migrants in this country from the EU did not face extra NHS fees and did get access to in work benefits. Someone could come to the UK from Italy and get a minimum wage job, housing allowance, tax credits etc
* I'm a father to a 7 and 5 year old. I can guarantee to you Father Christmas is real and will be visiting my children on Christmas Eve. And you know how I can guarantee that? I am Father Christmas and I will be putting presents under the tree (with my wife) and ensuring Father Christmas is extremely real for as long as they believe.
Just as I work to be Father Christmas and ensure he delivers to my children, so our government needs to work hard to deliver these trade agreements - and if they don't they can be expelled and replaced with someone better. See point one.
Looking forward to full-throated support from PB Brexitories the next time that there's industrial action in pursuit of higher wages. Solidarity comrades! ✊
Just filled up at the local Sainsbury's. Probably busier than normal, but not queuing out of the station. In truth, I wouldn't have filled up today had it not been for the news, but I did need to fill up and would have done so had something else triggered me to remember that I need to fill up for this afternoon/weekend.
So long as people aren't filling up containers, then there shouldn't be a problem. Anyone filling up today won't be filling up tomorrow (unless they're doing a long journey).
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
So you're repeating the lie? Have you no integrity?
If he said that as part of Vote Leave (he did not) then on what date did he say it?
Look Philip, You´ve been caught out. The evidence is clear. You can keep spinning or accept that you are embarassing yourself.
The evidence is clear, he didn't say it. A known liar fabricated that video and put a false caption on it and was called out on the BBC for lying.
But its good to see you have no integrity. If you honestly think Daniel Hannan as part of Vote Leave as captioned said those words during the Referendum then please quote on what date he said it so the full thing can be seen in context.
But you can't. As it is a lie. That video is a bullshit fabrication.
Wait a minute, are you saying that Hannon did not say 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market’ in the face of a video of him saying 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market’?
Yes I am absolutely saying that Hannan from Vote Leave did not say 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market' in the face of a doctored video of him saying that.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
Tbh Philip, I rate most of what you post on here and although our political views differ markedly, I generally enjoy the challenge your well-argued points deliver to my world view. It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. However, you're flogging a dead horse on this one.
To answer your specific point: 'It's low wage open immigration that has ended' - it's the ending of low wage open immigration that's causing the current crisis.
Absolutely it is I agree.
Which is a good thing. An end to low wages is literally what people voted for.
Why are you upset about the end of low wages?
For me, this was one of the two* potentially legitimate concerns about free movement and one positive that might come from Brexit.
However, it's a bit of a mixed bag. Great for HGV drivers, possibly (as long as the market doesn't adjust to other forms of distibution, more rail etc actually cutting demand and wages longer term). Possibly good for other jobs that have to be here - supermarket staff etc. Of course, higher wages in these sectors also mean higher food prices, which are a greater share of the income of those on lower incomes. Does your average person in, say, the lowest 10% of income pre-Brexit end up better off in buying power? I don't know.
There are also those jobs that can move easily. Call centres, some manufacturing. There's a limit on higher wages there due to lack of competition for jobs as, at some point, it becomes moe economical to move the jobs to where the workers are available at lower prices, particularly if you can't import the workers instead. Those people will probably not get big pay rises (some might move to higher paid jobs in e.g. HGV driving, but not everyone) but the cost of food etc will increase.
Overall, does reducing cheap labour supply make things better or worse on average for those on lowest incomes before Brexit? I don't know. Some winners for sure, some losers too. For some of these jobs a similar effect could have been achieved through an increase in minimum wage, but with similar pros and cons (other jobs, the pay is going up much higher/was already above minimum wage so less relevant).
*The other being pressure on services in some areas, although that only changes if people leave in large numbers. Given some of those leaving are providing the services (e.g. NHS) it doesn't necessarily follow that pressures ease - and government could have done more to address these issues in affected areas anyway.
One issue is the lack of investment in productivity over a number of years. Hands were literally cheaper than machines.
The classic that I remember is from the Economist in the 1980s. They asked why, since a German steelworker cost 20x as much (literally) than an Indian steelworker, there were any German steelworks.
The answer was that the German steelworker produced 21x steel (IIRC).
So the German worker was cheaper.
This is true across a range of industries - a combination of investment in productivity by the company and a decent social/legal/infrastructure framework creates a level of productivity that supports the higher wages.
For example, I worked for a company with software development teams around the world. Since they were working on bit of the same system, the comparison was almost perfectly fair. India was the most expensive place to get software developed - due to productivity. London was second cheapest....
Yep, so maybe we get productivity increases due to lack of cheap labour. Good thing, in general. But if you find a way of dealing with 25% fewer workers on 20% higher pay (or whatever), that's great for the 75% of workers still employed, but not for the 25% looking for new jobs. Or, indeed, it still might be great in the long term if it boosts the economy and creates more jobs, but there is short term pain.
The UK, as a whole, has done well out of transitioning to a more service-focused economy, but it certainly hasn't been good for everyone.
Of course, if you fail to raise productivity then someone else will and you lose out anyway.
My point was really that higher wages are good for those getting the wages, perhaps good for everyone long term, but it's simplistic to not recognise that there will be short term (maybe medium-long term) losers too.
The universal experience of the industrial age has been that mechanising jobs creates more jobs than it "destroys"
For example, McDonalds, when they looked at automating the kitchen, at the same time looked at redeploying the staff to the front to make a better experience for the customers. They were even looking at *more* staff....
Hence why Foxy of this parish can laze around doing medical stuff, rather than working as a villein on the Lords land, with a bit of time off to grow his own food...
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
Tbh Philip, I rate most of what you post on here and although our political views differ markedly, I generally enjoy the challenge your well-argued points deliver to my world view. It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. However, you're flogging a dead horse on this one.
To answer your specific point: 'It's low wage open immigration that has ended' - it's the ending of low wage open immigration that's causing the current crisis.
All EU countries are experiencing shortages. Sure, ours is a bit more pronounced as our market adjusts but it will.
Ours is rather more acute if the overall European shortfall is estimated at 500,000 and our share is estimated north of 100,000, and that's before we get to the self inflicted wound
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Which is fine and I agree with you, but at the same time the government took no steps to get HGV drivers trained up from 2017 onwards and slowly reducing our reliance on Eastern European drivers. Now we're left with a crunch that we didn't need, yes in 6-12 months everything will be resolved because driving test capacity is finally picking up and there's a huge backlog of people waiting to be trained and tested. It doesn't help us with today's problems, of course, but it's another thing we can add to May's terrible government.
Back in 2017, however, where was the incentive to become a HGV driver, the pay was rubbish, work conditions so bad most drivers attempted to scare newcomers away and there seemed little chance that freedom of movement would change.
I'm not saying more couldn't be done, however it wasn't as clear cut as it was now.
The issue will be the continual story that companies were unwilling to invest in training new starters because it was easier to bring someone from eastern Europe. Even today companies are trying to get DWP to pay for the training courses rather than using their own money.
Central London isn't especially low rise. And you can get permission for a serious tower fairly easily.
The very central parts of London, yes, but as soon as you go just a short distance from the absolute centre it's very low-rise (Clapham, Ealing etc).
What is needed isn't high-rise towers, it's attractive developments, perhaps round a courtyard, of four or five storeys.
I do wonder whether one of the problems is the fact that leases rarely now come to and end, because leaseholders can extend them. Are all those unsatisfactory flat conversions and and ugly sixties blocks never going to be redeveloped because the freeholder can never get possession?
On the other hand, I think the pandemic has given us a great opportunity for converting (or in some cases converting back) offices to residential use, since office demand has fallen so much. I fear it's an opportunity that is going to be thrown away.
“There is a European free trade zone from Iceland to the Russian border and we will be part of it.”
Which is worded to make most people think nothing would change, trade-wise, and for even the better-informed to assume some kind of EEA status was being promised.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit
No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
Genuine question.
Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
So you're repeating the lie? Have you no integrity?
If he said that as part of Vote Leave (he did not) then on what date did he say it?
Look Philip, You´ve been caught out. The evidence is clear. You can keep spinning or accept that you are embarassing yourself.
The evidence is clear, he didn't say it. A known liar fabricated that video and put a false caption on it and was called out on the BBC for lying.
But its good to see you have no integrity. If you honestly think Daniel Hannan as part of Vote Leave as captioned said those words during the Referendum then please quote on what date he said it so the full thing can be seen in context.
But you can't. As it is a lie. That video is a bullshit fabrication.
Wait a minute, are you saying that Hannon did not say 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market’ in the face of a video of him saying 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market’?
Yes I am absolutely saying that Hannan from Vote Leave did not say 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market' in the face of a doctored video of him saying that.
Bastards, editing out that 'BUT THEY SHOULD BE!' at the end of him literally saying 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market'.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit
No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
So you're repeating the lie? Have you no integrity?
If he said that as part of Vote Leave (he did not) then on what date did he say it?
Look Philip, You´ve been caught out. The evidence is clear. You can keep spinning or accept that you are embarassing yourself.
The evidence is clear, he didn't say it. A known liar fabricated that video and put a false caption on it and was called out on the BBC for lying.
But its good to see you have no integrity. If you honestly think Daniel Hannan as part of Vote Leave as captioned said those words during the Referendum then please quote on what date he said it so the full thing can be seen in context.
But you can't. As it is a lie. That video is a bullshit fabrication.
Now you're going too far.
Consider this, from fullfact.org (who, if nothing else, take time to get this sort of thing right)
For example, Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan said during an interview in 2015 that: "To repeat, absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market".
That is a different stance compared to the main claims of Leave campaigners, and Mr Hannan’s wording isn’t consistent across the interview itself either. Earlier on, he said "absolutely nobody is suggesting we would give up our position in the free market in Europe".
That page links to a video on the YouTube page of Dan Hannan. Who I am sure you aren't claiming is a known liar. (Though his belief that you can have seamless trade without some sort of political and legal system setting and managing the rules doesn't seem to be borne out by reality.)
VL fought a genius campaign that showed just enough ankle to keep EEA types on board. That makes VL weasels and those who fell for it Muppets.
Daniel Hannan said that quote in May 2015 Vote Leave was founded in October 2015
So how did Daniel Hannan of Vote Leave say that in May 2015 given that Vote Leave hadn't even been created by then?
That's like saying RochdalePioneers of the Liberal Democrats says we should vote Labour so even Liberal Democrats are saying vote Labour . . . by quoting him from when he was in the Labour Party and before he joined the Liberal Democrats.
The Vote Leave line was crystal clear that we would leave the Single Market. Anything Hannan said before he joined Vote Leave was not said by Vote Leave.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
You did not say Europe is half a million truckers short and I would rather listen to truckers who do the job to be honest
Why do you think there are no fuel shortages and empty shelves in the EU, Mr G?
I've experienced no fuel shortages or empty shelves here at all.
I'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
The issue we have is that it's clear there are intermittent and store / petrol station specific issues.
Yet because a lot of people on here have not seen any problems they don't believe there is an issue.
It reminds me of the 8 year old who did a scientific experiment to confirm if the tooth fairy existed. He proved that the fairy didn't exist and then discovered his parents no longer gave him money for lost teeth.
And do you think those issues are being reported proportionately?
I have friends, family and colleagues all over the country. Not a single one has raised this as an issue - the only ones that do are the usual FBPE suspects on Twitter and the media hacks that retweet them, so I take it with a massive pinch of salt.
The Government and supermarket chains are talking about challenges in some areas but it's far from the national crisis it's made out to be.
I should also be clear, the Aldi issues aren't within Aldi, it's missed / delayed deliveries to the warehouse that is the issue there (the warehouse is 1/2 mile from our local Aldi which is the regional flagship store for the regional head office at the warehouse).
Out of curiosity @eek , what is your assessment of the buy to let opportunities in Darlington? What's going on with those streets full of 60k houses next to the railway station?
Not the area I would personally be buying in - far too much chance of getting problem tenants (the local primary school there has the regional lead for traveller children if that helps demonstrate).
Another issue is that a lot of the buildings are now time served, there is nothing immediately wrong with them but 30+ years of minimal care means there is a lot of stuff that is hidden but could go wrong.
Also £400 a month doesn't go far when your tenant leaves with the boiler... It's not an area I would buy to let in without personal oversight (and there are easier ways for me to earn £4000 a year).
If I was targeting the Treasury clientele I would be spending more for small more modern houses, or things to renovate, perhaps bungalows.
This could easily be a high-management-time option, which will eat your margin, though there may be a short-term appreciation boost in the mix.
Though if you are geared up to a decent size portfolio and target a tenant group such as eg young parents with kids about to start school, you may get good long term tenants with HB. Obvs schools and a safe route thereto are important in that case.
While there is a possibility of a short term appreciation boost - I personally wouldn't bet on it. The reason prices haven't risen around here is because there is a lot of new build housing and a lot more planned (the next 20 years has about 5 new estates planned alongside the new J60 to A66 bypass) and that's without the other schemes.
There is probably enough permission to increase Darlington's population by 30-40% without any more land being allocated - we don't have NIMBYs round here.
Waiting staff receive 100% of their tips from today
Excellent news and quite right
Bad news for kitchen porters.
I fail to see, and always have failed to see, why as a customer I should be expected to top up staff wages. When I ran a shop I didn't expect my staff, who often went over and beyond, to be tipped.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit
No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
Genuine question.
Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.
In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding* that overall it led to:
Higher productivity. Higher skills across the board. Higher wages (for native workers) More products & services (for native consumers).
It’s not just theory; it’s observation from the data.
*with one or two exceptions, and with a noted bias toward higher income groups.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
You did not say Europe is half a million truckers short and I would rather listen to truckers who do the job to be honest
Why do you think there are no fuel shortages and empty shelves in the EU, Mr G?
I've experienced no fuel shortages or empty shelves here at all.
I'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
The issue we have is that it's clear there are intermittent and store / petrol station specific issues.
Yet because a lot of people on here have not seen any problems they don't believe there is an issue.
It reminds me of the 8 year old who did a scientific experiment to confirm if the tooth fairy existed. He proved that the fairy didn't exist and then discovered his parents no longer gave him money for lost teeth.
And do you think those issues are being reported proportionately?
I have friends, family and colleagues all over the country. Not a single one has raised this as an issue - the only ones that do are the usual FBPE suspects on Twitter and the media hacks that retweet them, so I take it with a massive pinch of salt.
The Government and supermarket chains are talking about challenges in some areas but it's far from the national crisis it's made out to be.
I should also be clear, the Aldi issues aren't within Aldi, it's missed / delayed deliveries to the warehouse that is the issue there (the warehouse is 1/2 mile from our local Aldi which is the regional flagship store for the regional head office at the warehouse).
Out of curiosity @eek , what is your assessment of the buy to let opportunities in Darlington? What's going on with those streets full of 60k houses next to the railway station?
Not the area I would personally be buying in - far too much chance of getting problem tenants (the local primary school there has the regional lead for traveller children if that helps demonstrate).
Another issue is that a lot of the buildings are now time served, there is nothing immediately wrong with them but 30+ years of minimal care means there is a lot of stuff that is hidden but could go wrong.
Also £400 a month doesn't go far when your tenant leaves with the boiler... It's not an area I would buy to let in without personal oversight (and there are easier ways for me to earn £4000 a year).
Yes - interesting, thanks. Not surprising.
I think this goes to illustrate to my point that landlords are providing a social good in these areas: its a hard business, to do it well involves a big investment of time and energy, it is very stressful, it involves dealing with difficult people, and it is not particularly profitable as you say. If you go in to it in the hope of capital gains, whilst outsourcing all your problems to a lettings agent you will fail. Adding more regulations and taxes in this environment is not desirable.
That all said, I must confess to making a bet on a similar property a decade ago on the basis of gut instinct. It was empty and there was a vast stock of surplus housing. I bought it for £7500 and turned it in to a successful (as in cash flow positive) holiday lettings business. I was subjected to extremes of both praise and criticism by the local population. But I was the first to see this opportunity and hundreds of people followed in the local area. I eventually sold it for a significant gain.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
Likewise in agriculture.
The mantra of fruit and veg farmers in southern England has evolved since the 1990s:
The locals aren't willing to do the work so get some Northerners to do it. The Northerners aren't willing to do the work so get some Irish to do it. The Irish aren't willing to do the work so get some Portuguese to do it. The Portuguese aren't willing to do the work so get some Poles to do it. The Poles aren't willing to do the work so get some Romanians to do it. The Romanians aren't willing to do the work so get some Bulgarian to do it. The Bulgarians aren't willing to do the work so get some Ukrainians to do it.
I believe they're now trying to get workers from Central Asia.
Well it might give the Afghan refugees a job opportunity but the model is fundamentally flawed.
Afghans need jobs and the farming jobs there are mainly opium which is generally frowned on so this sounds like a pretty great model? What's the problem with it specifically? As far as I can see everyone gets their fruit and veg, everyone involved gets a better job, and the only thing that might see production drop is opium, which is already seeing lower demand because it's getting out-competed by fentanyl.
The more is fundamentally flawed because you need ever poorer countries to source your labour supply from.
At the end of the chain you just stop farming opium, no? Fentanyl is extremely efficient to produce, the world isn't going to run out of drugs.
The Taliban are a nightmare for Western drug issues for exactly that reason - they forbid opium farming, fentanyl becomes more competitive than heroin and is a much, much more dangerous drug.
Organic* opium/heroin overdoses have been falling in the US, even as overall opiate deaths have been rising. Traditional heroin has been priced out the market by fentanyl.
* No, not free range, organic, no fertilizers. Organic, as in not synthetic.
Probably both, actually. Poppies will grow in pure rubble and aren't plagued by any pests I know of, so why bother with chemicals?
I do like to pick the liberty caps with which Mother Nature covers Dartmoor at this time of year, on the basis that they are as organic as fuck, and the only class As you can get your hands on without in any way contributing to the horrible drug trade. Just kidding obvs.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is also what the Daily Mail constituency is beginning to notice too.
Agree that Brexit and returns sharpens it for us (20% of problem). But also interestingly for Poland and Germany. Did our Poles go back to Spain?
The most heavily affected European countries are Poland, the UK and Germany. The UK is in a particularly difficult position as it is not only grappling with Brexit, but it also saw many European workers leave over the course of the pandemic, as fears over lockdowns grew.
One point not mentioned. What happens with mutual recognition?
Does our semi-isolation from the EU market mean that our newly trained drivers have to stay UK-based?
There's no evidence of shortages in any of those countries in that report, as far as I've read. Because of the fluid nature of mobility in the EU, driver and container shortages aren't the same as supply shortages.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit
No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
Genuine question.
Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.
In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding* that overall it led to:
Higher productivity. Higher skills across the board. Higher wages (for native workers) More products & services (for native consumers).
It’s not just theory; it’s observation from the data.
*with one or two exceptions, and with a noted bias toward higher income groups.
“There is a European free trade zone from Iceland to the Russian border and we will be part of it.”
Which is worded to make most people think nothing would change, trade-wise, and for even the better-informed to assume some kind of EEA status was being promised.
Utter charlatans.
The paragraph that is taken from explicitly says that a trade agreement was being sought not the EEA.
Third, we will have a new UK-EU trading relationship. There is a European free trade zone from Iceland to the Russian border and we will be part of it. The heart of what we all want is the continuation of tariff-free trade with minimal bureaucracy. Countries as far away as Australia have Mutual Recognition agreements with the EU that deal with complex customs (and other ‘non-tariff barrier’) issues. We will do the same.
That paragraph is immediately followed by six paragraphs explaining why the "Single Market" is a bad thing and why we should leave the Single Market and why regulatory diversity is a good thing.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit
No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
Genuine question.
Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.
In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding that overall it led to:
Higher productivity. Higher skills across the board. Higher wages (for native workers) More products & services (for native consumers).
It’s not just theory; it’s observation.
Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.
Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.
The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.
You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.
I have this image of the ghost of Jim Callaghan exiting the aircraft and in chorus with all the PB Boris fanbois exclaiming "crisis, what crisis?"
Sunny Jim never said it when he was alive though.
It is nonetheless an urban myth that lives on in the British psyche.
In that case scratch out Jim, and just leave it as a chorus of PB fanbois.
I believe it was a Sun headline which was then used to beat Callaghan over the issue. A reminder of when the Sun had influence, so at least some things have got better!
Its astonishing how many people believe he actually said those words. My ex car-share, a guy in his 60's, claims he remembers seeing him say it on the news. And yet he never said that, that was the headline that has morphed into a 'quote'.
The other classic is 'The batsman's Holding the bowler's Willey' (or maybe the other way round), Sadly debunked by the great man himself (Brian Johnson) and after extensive searches of the radio archives. Would have been great, but never really happened.
Memory is weird. Stephen Jay Gould told a story about a childhood remembrance, that when he went to the place many years later he realised could not have happened the way he remembered it. And yet he could still remember it that way. This is similar in some ways to the liars that we occasionally encounter, who convince themselves they are telling the truth (the PM for one, has been suggested).
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
So you're repeating the lie? Have you no integrity?
If he said that as part of Vote Leave (he did not) then on what date did he say it?
Look Philip, You´ve been caught out. The evidence is clear. You can keep spinning or accept that you are embarassing yourself.
The evidence is clear, he didn't say it. A known liar fabricated that video and put a false caption on it and was called out on the BBC for lying.
But its good to see you have no integrity. If you honestly think Daniel Hannan as part of Vote Leave as captioned said those words during the Referendum then please quote on what date he said it so the full thing can be seen in context.
But you can't. As it is a lie. That video is a bullshit fabrication.
Wait a minute, are you saying that Hannon did not say 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market’ in the face of a video of him saying 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market’?
Yes I am absolutely saying that Hannan from Vote Leave did not say 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market' in the face of a doctored video of him saying that.
Bastards, editing out that 'BUT THEY SHOULD BE!' at the end of him literally saying 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market'.
Indeed the video that is taken from had multiple examples like that of them taking people out of context to reverse the meaning of what was said.
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
Just listening to the discussion on the radio this morning I understood the problem to be like this.
1. There is not a shortage of HGV qualified drivers in the UK. 2. There is a shortage of people willing to drive HGVs at current wages and conditions. 3. There is increasing demand for delivery vehicles and drivers. 4. HGV qualified drivers would like higher wages and better conditions. 5. Haulage firms would like to bring in foreign labour to avoid higher wages. 6. Wages and conditions are low because they were supressed by the availability of foreign labour. 7. Foreign labour went home because of Brexit and Covid.
The drivers and the bosses want opposing solutions to the problem.
The fundamental problem is the pay is too low.
Getting a few thousand more cheap foreigners to keep the wages down helps in the short term but makes the medium and long term worse.
Likewise in agriculture.
The mantra of fruit and veg farmers in southern England has evolved since the 1990s:
The locals aren't willing to do the work so get some Northerners to do it. The Northerners aren't willing to do the work so get some Irish to do it. The Irish aren't willing to do the work so get some Portuguese to do it. The Portuguese aren't willing to do the work so get some Poles to do it. The Poles aren't willing to do the work so get some Romanians to do it. The Romanians aren't willing to do the work so get some Bulgarian to do it. The Bulgarians aren't willing to do the work so get some Ukrainians to do it.
I believe they're now trying to get workers from Central Asia.
Well it might give the Afghan refugees a job opportunity but the model is fundamentally flawed.
Afghans need jobs and the farming jobs there are mainly opium which is generally frowned on so this sounds like a pretty great model? What's the problem with it specifically? As far as I can see everyone gets their fruit and veg, everyone involved gets a better job, and the only thing that might see production drop is opium, which is already seeing lower demand because it's getting out-competed by fentanyl.
The more is fundamentally flawed because you need ever poorer countries to source your labour supply from.
At the end of the chain you just stop farming opium, no? Fentanyl is extremely efficient to produce, the world isn't going to run out of drugs.
The Taliban are a nightmare for Western drug issues for exactly that reason - they forbid opium farming, fentanyl becomes more competitive than heroin and is a much, much more dangerous drug.
Organic* opium/heroin overdoses have been falling in the US, even as overall opiate deaths have been rising. Traditional heroin has been priced out the market by fentanyl.
* No, not free range, organic, no fertilizers. Organic, as in not synthetic.
Eh? Opium - or rather its active ingredient - is an organic compound, whencesoever sourced. A fairly complex carbon compound.
Every time he follows Mandelson's advice of theatrically taking on the left as policy, he loses points, as with the suspension of Corbyn. It clearly isn't 1995, as many people have said. I think he needs new advice, across the proper range in the party from right to left, otherwise he won't be able to take advantage of the Tories' pratfalls this winter in the way he should.
The polls may shift by next week and following the current crisis, though, at least in terms of a knock to the tory percentage, which may give him another chance, and a more auspicious opening atmosphere to his conference speech.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit
No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
Genuine question.
Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.
In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding* that overall it led to:
Higher productivity. Higher skills across the board. Higher wages (for native workers) More products & services (for native consumers).
It’s not just theory; it’s observation from the data.
*with one or two exceptions, and with a noted bias toward higher income groups.
The noted divide between those who did well out of FOM and those who didn't is a pretty good match to those who voted for BREXIT and those who didn't.
I dd very well and voted Remain, because it was good for me and mine.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit
No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
Genuine question.
Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
I have this image of the ghost of Jim Callaghan exiting the aircraft and in chorus with all the PB Boris fanbois exclaiming "crisis, what crisis?"
Sunny Jim never said it when he was alive though.
It is nonetheless an urban myth that lives on in the British psyche.
In that case scratch out Jim, and just leave it as a chorus of PB fanbois.
I believe it was a Sun headline which was then used to beat Callaghan over the issue. A reminder of when the Sun had influence, so at least some things have got better!
Its astonishing how many people believe he actually said those words. My ex car-share, a guy in his 60's, claims he remembers seeing him say it on the news. And yet he never said that, that was the headline that has morphed into a 'quote'.
The other classic is 'The batsman's Holding the bowler's Willey' (or maybe the other way round), Sadly debunked by the great man himself (Brian Johnson) and after extensive searches of the radio archives. Would have been great, but never really happened.
Not to mention the mythical characters in Captain Pugwash (which went to a successful defamation case, so someone's memory must have been VERY definite - but also very wrong).
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit
No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
Genuine question.
Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.
In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding that overall it led to:
Higher productivity. Higher skills across the board. Higher wages (for native workers) More products & services (for native consumers).
It’s not just theory; it’s observation.
Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.
Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.
The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.
You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.
Well said.
The way we had unlimited unskilled European immigration but had massive barriers for getting a visa for highly skilled non-Europeans was the complete opposite of a sensible immigration policy.
As was noted at the time, the Fuel Protestors got public support when they were this abstract, amorphous blob. The moment they chose leaders, who started to appear on TV, the support for them and their cause plummeted.
Waiting staff receive 100% of their tips from today
Excellent news and quite right
Bad news for kitchen porters.
I fail to see, and always have failed to see, why as a customer I should be expected to top up staff wages. When I ran a shop I didn't expect my staff, who often went over and beyond, to be tipped.
Of course it's impossible to see, once you have overlooked custom. Custom is an evolutionary process not a rational or logical one.
But you do tip waiters, and don't tip check out people in Lidl for the same reasons that you (if male) normally put on trousers, not a skirt, before going out to work, don't wear diving boots and a top hat in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, and don't dress as a gibbon with all your friends when going to a Test Match...(no forget that last one).
Burke and to some extent David Hume are the great thinkers in this fascinating realm.
Outside your custom comfort zone is, I suspect, a sort of life sentence of slight exile.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit
No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
Genuine question.
Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.
In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding that overall it led to:
Higher productivity. Higher skills across the board. Higher wages (for native workers) More products & services (for native consumers).
It’s not just theory; it’s observation.
Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.
Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.
The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.
You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.
So what you’re saying is, you’ve had enough of facts, let’s go with the feel.
I really need to add that to my Brexit matrix of excuses;
(5) Claim that all human existence is essentially unknowable and that Brexit must be understood as beyond epistemology.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit
No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
Genuine question.
Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.
In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding* that overall it led to:
Higher productivity. Higher skills across the board. Higher wages (for native workers) More products & services (for native consumers).
It’s not just theory; it’s observation from the data.
*with one or two exceptions, and with a noted bias toward higher income groups.
Yeah but anecdote.
But you don't offer that gem in response to actual data, just a handwavy claim *about* data and studies by anonymous "econometricians" which sounds nonsense to me. Forget data vs anecdotes, a contrast usually misunderstood by those who make it, and try logic and common sense. How much data do you need to predict that, let's say, a business selling £5 notes for £4 is going to do all the turnover it wants?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
We voted to leave the Single Market.
No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.
They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.
We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
You are telling a lie.
Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.
But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.
There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.
I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit
No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
Yes, no easy solution in sight.
Anyway, morning all. Autumn definitely here. I've needed a pullover for the morning walk for the first time in months yesterday and today. And today repeated skeins of geese flying over southwards, no doubt en route to the fields and reservoirs.
Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355
Sounds good from labour. Now they need to do something about second home owners, holiday lets and Airbnb’s that blight many rural and coastal communities pricing locals and workers needed locally out. Giving people priority on a new build in Blackburn or Stoke May be good for that area but labour needs to do much much more.
Not really.
The six month priority does not do much. If a developer can get £320k in 6 months or £300k from a first time buyer now, they will generally wait out the 6 months.
And as for restricting foreign purchasers in new developments, setting it at 50% is surely a piss take? For a few developments it might be better than the status quo but try selling "we will look after you, only half the new homes we are building are going to rich foreigners" on the doorstep.
Should not be 6 months then, should be permanent until we resolve the decline in home ownership. New builds should only be able to be bought by first time buyers (thus also cutting down on buy to lets too) for the foreseeable future in London and the Home Counties as that is where the housing shortage is and that is where the fewest people are able to afford to be able to get on the ladder. Once they are on the ladder and have bought their property they can then move up and buy existing properties, it is getting them on the ladder that is the issue.
50% is betting than nothing but yes more could be done to ensure native Londoners can buy property in the capital, especially central London and not just foreign investors
Comments
Once we had them hooked (LOL) on supplying the NHS, we could start using our leverage on their entire cash flow to make them play nice.
If he said that as part of Vote Leave (he did not) then on what date did he say it?
Excellent news and quite right
Does Scotland want to be part of Yorkshire as well?
What's to stop thousands of migrant workers already in the UK from getting better paid jobs in other countries if their pay is held down by getting thousands of cheaper migrant workers ?
Rising prices aren't a problem so long as they're rising slower than wages. When prices are rising faster than wages (as has happened) then that's a problem.
Its great to see a reversal.
The reason it gets brought up, is that people want to solve the housing price crisis. But they don't want more houses (near them). So "brownfield!", "foreigners buy our houses and ship them to China!", "Second homes!" etc etc
While some of these effect parts of the country, the problem is simply that the supply of housing has not kept up with the number of people.
Which is why in my part of London, people are paying £1m plus to live in houses built as company houses by a brickworks in Edwardian times. Not mansions.....
The UK, as a whole, has done well out of transitioning to a more service-focused economy, but it certainly hasn't been good for everyone.
Of course, if you fail to raise productivity then someone else will and you lose out anyway.
My point was really that higher wages are good for those getting the wages, perhaps good for everyone long term, but it's simplistic to not recognise that there will be short term (maybe medium-long term) losers too.
1: We can elect the government that sets our laws - and kick out the bastards if they do things we dislike.
2: We can control the money that we spend rather than having over £350m a week gross being sent into Europe, of which we only got some of it back and not all spent in the UK how we wanted it spent.
3: We can cherrypick and have a free trade, zero-tariff, zero-quota agreement with Europe and sign free trade deals with any other nations we choose to do so too such as the CPTPP etc potentially. The CPTPP if we join it will be even bigger than the EU and would come on top of our free trade agreement with Europe.
4: We can control our own natural resources as we choose to do so.
5: We can control the immigration system so that we can get high skilled, high wage migrants who can contribute to society instead of low skilled, low wage migrants who deflated our economy while increasing pressure on housing and services.
If you want those 5 summarised in one word each: Laws, Money, Trade, Fish and Borders - the issues we've been debating for years now!
1. Low interest rates
2. Planning dysfunction
3. Rising demand
We need to tackle (2).
London is an astonishingly low rise city.
Poland, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Belarus.
https://www.commercialfleet.org/news/truck-news/2021/09/17/hgv-driving-test-changes-risks-accident-rise-says-insurance-firm
Agree that Brexit and returns sharpens it for us (20% of problem). But also interestingly Poland and Germany are also mentioned. Did our Poles go back to Spain?
The most heavily affected European countries are Poland, the UK and Germany. The UK is in a particularly difficult position as it is not only grappling with Brexit, but it also saw many European workers leave over the course of the pandemic, as fears over lockdowns grew.
One point not mentioned. What happens with mutual recognition?
Does our semi-isolation from the EU market mean that our newly trained drivers have to stay UK-based?
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/24/arizona-review-draft-report-tally-biden-won-514088
Another issue is that a lot of the buildings are now time served, there is nothing immediately wrong with them but 30+ years of minimal care means there is a lot of stuff that is hidden but could go wrong.
Also £400 a month doesn't go far when your tenant leaves with the boiler... It's not an area I would buy to let in without personal oversight (and there are easier ways for me to earn £4000 a year).
But its good to see you have no integrity. If you honestly think Daniel Hannan as part of Vote Leave as captioned said those words during the Referendum then please quote on what date he said it so the full thing can be seen in context.
But you can't. As it is a lie. That video is a bullshit fabrication.
Interesting a new agent is trying to see if he can increase prices, a house near us has come up at 20% more than the last sale price and it's a smaller property. Will be interesting to see if it sells and introduces more sensible prices.
Still, this is June 2025, so we had better wait and see...
* No, not free range, organic, no fertilizers. Organic, as in not synthetic.
No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
Anyhow if the world feels like it needs more opium production but poor people who would gladly take better-paying jobs have somehow become a scare resource, I'm sure developed countries could offer them some tech to increase the efficiency of their farms.
https://twitter.com/JohnRentoul/status/1441299690880843787
2) Irrelevant, we paid for market access
3) Pie in the Sky as Usual (Do you believe in Father Christmas still?)
4)Fish?..hahahahahahahahaha
5)Paper tiger. Immigration was never a problem. We used to screw them by high tax, extra NHS fees, no access to in work benefits, it was our fault we never used the money to improve services for workshy Brits who never contributed anything anyway.
It's political (of course) and most people don't join parties or get involved in much political discussion except with a small circle.
You don't involve with politics at any level unless you are prepared for: irrational arguments, unreasonable rudeness, dogmatism, cliche, groupthink, unreasonable rejection and dislike, ignoring vital questions, virtue signalling, hypocrisy and unwillingness to admit to being wrong. Try the House of Commons.
A few of those still standing at that point (not many, maybe mostly older) and don't want fame or a career out of politics, but perhaps made a few bob out of the C & A by election, contribute to PB. Personally I am grateful to them
For too long we've had potentially double-digit price rises and 1% wage rises. That's what I didn't like.
Didn’t PB Tories assure us that Raab saw off Rayner with ease?
All those rural sites sound ideal for charging stations as part of a mixed business.
I wonder if @Charles is investing yet !
The plan is great and I will be very local to it when I go back to the office (it's next door) - which given what I'm doing nowadays will mean I will probably be talking to people there an awful lot as since Covid I seem to have switched to labour market / tax compliance work...
Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
It’s low rise, and planning permission to go higher would be a nightmare.
(My house is in a conservation area, though not listed).
Consider this, from fullfact.org (who, if nothing else, take time to get this sort of thing right)
For example, Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan said during an interview in 2015 that: "To repeat, absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market".
That is a different stance compared to the main claims of Leave campaigners, and Mr Hannan’s wording isn’t consistent across the interview itself either. Earlier on, he said "absolutely nobody is suggesting we would give up our position in the free market in Europe".
https://fullfact.org/europe/what-was-promised-about-customs-union-referendum/
That page links to a video on the YouTube page of Dan Hannan. Who I am sure you aren't claiming is a known liar. (Though his belief that you can have seamless trade without some sort of political and legal system setting and managing the rules doesn't seem to be borne out by reality.)
VL fought a genius campaign that showed just enough ankle to keep EEA types on board. That makes VL weasels and those who fell for it Muppets.
https://www.propertytribes.com/another-beginner-set-of-conundrums-t-127646790.html
If I was targeting the Treasury clientele I would be spending more for small more modern houses, or things to renovate, perhaps bungalows.
This could easily be a high-management-time option, which will eat your margin, though there may be a short-term appreciation boost in the mix.
Though if you are geared up to a decent size portfolio and target a tenant group such as eg young parents with kids about to start school, you may get good long term tenants with HB. Obvs schools and a safe route thereto are important in that case.
2 Its not irrelevant, since the money we paid "for market access" was not going to the UK, it was going elsewhere. Now we get market access for free of charge without any payments.
3 Not pie in the sky and yes absolutely 100% I believe* in Father Christmas
4 Yeah I don't care about it either but others do
5 Not true. Migrants in this country from the EU did not face extra NHS fees and did get access to in work benefits. Someone could come to the UK from Italy and get a minimum wage job, housing allowance, tax credits etc
* I'm a father to a 7 and 5 year old. I can guarantee to you Father Christmas is real and will be visiting my children on Christmas Eve. And you know how I can guarantee that? I am Father Christmas and I will be putting presents under the tree (with my wife) and ensuring Father Christmas is extremely real for as long as they believe.
Just as I work to be Father Christmas and ensure he delivers to my children, so our government needs to work hard to deliver these trade agreements - and if they don't they can be expelled and replaced with someone better. See point one.
So long as people aren't filling up containers, then there shouldn't be a problem. Anyone filling up today won't be filling up tomorrow (unless they're doing a long journey).
For example, McDonalds, when they looked at automating the kitchen, at the same time looked at redeploying the staff to the front to make a better experience for the customers. They were even looking at *more* staff....
Hence why Foxy of this parish can laze around doing medical stuff, rather than working as a villein on the Lords land, with a bit of time off to grow his own food...
I'm not saying more couldn't be done, however it wasn't as clear cut as it was now.
The issue will be the continual story that companies were unwilling to invest in training new starters because it was easier to bring someone from eastern Europe. Even today companies are trying to get DWP to pay for the training courses rather than using their own money.
What is needed isn't high-rise towers, it's attractive developments, perhaps round a courtyard, of four or five storeys.
I do wonder whether one of the problems is the fact that leases rarely now come to and end, because leaseholders can extend them. Are all those unsatisfactory flat conversions and and ugly sixties blocks never going to be redeveloped because the freeholder can never get possession?
On the other hand, I think the pandemic has given us a great opportunity for converting (or in some cases converting back) offices to residential use, since office demand has fallen so much. I fear it's an opportunity that is going to be thrown away.
“There is a European free trade zone from Iceland to the Russian border and we will be part of it.”
Which is worded to make most people think nothing would change, trade-wise, and for even the better-informed to assume some kind of EEA status was being promised.
Utter charlatans.
Prior to petrol shortages
Vote Leave was founded in October 2015
So how did Daniel Hannan of Vote Leave say that in May 2015 given that Vote Leave hadn't even been created by then?
That's like saying RochdalePioneers of the Liberal Democrats says we should vote Labour so even Liberal Democrats are saying vote Labour . . . by quoting him from when he was in the Labour Party and before he joined the Liberal Democrats.
The Vote Leave line was crystal clear that we would leave the Single Market. Anything Hannan said before he joined Vote Leave was not said by Vote Leave.
There is probably enough permission to increase Darlington's population by 30-40% without any more land being allocated - we don't have NIMBYs round here.
In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding* that overall it led to:
Higher productivity.
Higher skills across the board.
Higher wages (for native workers)
More products & services (for native consumers).
It’s not just theory; it’s observation from the data.
*with one or two exceptions, and with a noted bias toward higher income groups.
I think this goes to illustrate to my point that landlords are providing a social good in these areas: its a hard business, to do it well involves a big investment of time and energy, it is very stressful, it involves dealing with difficult people, and it is not particularly profitable as you say. If you go in to it in the hope of capital gains, whilst outsourcing all your problems to a lettings agent you will fail. Adding more regulations and taxes in this environment is not desirable.
That all said, I must confess to making a bet on a similar property a decade ago on the basis of gut instinct. It was empty and there was a vast stock of surplus housing. I bought it for £7500 and turned it in to a successful (as in cash flow positive) holiday lettings business. I was subjected to extremes of both praise and criticism by the local population. But I was the first to see this opportunity and hundreds of people followed in the local area. I eventually sold it for a significant gain.
I do like to pick the liberty caps with which Mother Nature covers Dartmoor at this time of year, on the basis that they are as organic as fuck, and the only class As you can get your hands on without in any way contributing to the horrible drug trade. Just kidding obvs.
Third, we will have a new UK-EU trading relationship. There is a European free trade zone from Iceland to the Russian border and we will be part of it. The heart of what we all want is the continuation of tariff-free trade with minimal bureaucracy. Countries as far away as Australia have Mutual Recognition agreements with the EU that deal with complex customs (and other ‘non-tariff barrier’) issues. We will do the same.
That paragraph is immediately followed by six paragraphs explaining why the "Single Market" is a bad thing and why we should leave the Single Market and why regulatory diversity is a good thing.
Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.
The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.
You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.
The other classic is 'The batsman's Holding the bowler's Willey' (or maybe the other way round), Sadly debunked by the great man himself (Brian Johnson) and after extensive searches of the radio archives.
Would have been great, but never really happened.
Memory is weird. Stephen Jay Gould told a story about a childhood remembrance, that when he went to the place many years later he realised could not have happened the way he remembered it. And yet he could still remember it that way. This is similar in some ways to the liars that we occasionally encounter, who convince themselves they are telling the truth (the PM for one, has been suggested).
The polls may shift by next week and following the current crisis, though, at least in terms of a knock to the tory percentage, which may give him another chance, and a more auspicious opening atmosphere to his conference speech.
I dd very well and voted Remain, because it was good for me and mine.
The way we had unlimited unskilled European immigration but had massive barriers for getting a visa for highly skilled non-Europeans was the complete opposite of a sensible immigration policy.
But you do tip waiters, and don't tip check out people in Lidl for the same reasons that you (if male) normally put on trousers, not a skirt, before going out to work, don't wear diving boots and a top hat in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot, and don't dress as a gibbon with all your friends when going to a Test Match...(no forget that last one).
Burke and to some extent David Hume are the great thinkers in this fascinating realm.
Outside your custom comfort zone is, I suspect, a sort of life sentence of slight exile.
I really need to add that to my Brexit matrix of excuses;
(5) Claim that all human existence is essentially unknowable and that Brexit must be understood as beyond epistemology.
50% is betting than nothing but yes more could be done to ensure native Londoners can buy property in the capital, especially central London and not just foreign investors