After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?
Laugh as much as you like, I'm the one with 80 litres of diesel in the tank and all Tavistock's remaining supplies of tonic water in the larder.
I know people love to get Trans issues into every debate but what does a sex change clinic need tonic water for? 😉
It's dangerous stuff, Clarissa Dickson Wright drank two bottles of gin a day for years and ended up being poisoned by the tonic water. Steer clear altogether or be sure to dilute it with plenty of Tanqueray.
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.
Economics isn't really a hard science but econometric techniques, if applied properly, can yield useful insights. Simply dismissing their arguments because you disagree with their findings just makes you look silly. Plenty of economists do work in finance of course, and some of them are doing quite well out of it (cough). It's by no means the bad ones who stay in academia either. If anything it's a profession where wages tend to be inversely related to talent at the top, in my experience, because the best economists tend to gravitate towards academia and research careers.
I don't disagree with any of that and I'm not dismissing the idea of the lump of labour fallacy, in fact I think it's probably correct and it's also why I think trade deals are a net good. My issue has always been the blind spot from academics who overwhelmingly support unlimited immigration on wages at the bottom of the market. Wages for people like me going up by 20% *may* create a trickle down effect to raise wages at the bottom, the evidence is not particularly clear on that, but we do know that people like me do well in a high immigration environment and wages at the top rising quickly does also result in higher overall GDP and better overall productivity. Those are probably close to fact.
However, and there obviously is one, you can't simply apply the same theory to the bottom of the market where investment in productivity is low, the supply of labour is high and the barrier to entry non-existent. The market is totally different and it's increasingly obvious that the gains from EU immigration were made at the top (people like us) and those people at the bottom saw years of wage stagnation. That we're now seeing record wage inflation at the bottom does rather prove that quite emphatically. What I'm not saying and haven't said is that this will result to any increase in GDP, personally I don't think it will, it may lead to an overall reduction in GDP and maybe even GDP per capita.
My main point is that I don't think GDP or GDP per capita is a particular valuable or important statistic, I'd rather have a lower GDP with the national income properly distributed than a very high one with the top 5% of people having an economic share of 40% and the bottom 20% of people having just 5% or whatever income inequality is at the moment. If it means I have to pay more for my coffee or my restaurant bill goes up a bit then that's probably worth it for people who serve me my coffee and bring the food to my table to earn a proper living wage.
I agree with all of that. I would like to see a lasting compression of incomes but I am sceptical that Brexit will deliver it, and I think there are plenty of other policy changes that could deliver it with less collateral damage to the economy and without reducing people's rights and opportunities as Brexit has. I am also sceptical of all this championing of the lower paid from the kind of people who would normally cross the road to piss on the working class.
Well I'm glad you agree and you may or may not be shocked to know that most of us who voted to leave want the lower paid to be better off. It's literally the first part of "work hard and get on in life". EU membership rigged the game for companies by giving them an unlimited pool of low wage labour. Now they don't have it and they're having to actually pay their employees properly.
Anybody reading this thread would be tempted to think that in the olden days, before the EU, FOM and imported labour, British employers paid the working class generous wages that have only been undercut since we joined the EU (and then later when we imported workers from the accession countries). It's laughable - low wages have always been at the forefront of British capitalism, and it was only in the heavily unionised sectors that manual workers could bargain for higher wages. Why do people think London Transport and others were so keen on the Windrush immigrants? I suspect that the decline of the power of trades unions has more to do with the low wages in many sectors than imported labour.
Anyway, it's great to see so many Tories now advocating higher wages for the working class. At least something we can all agree on.
Windrush was at a time of high employment.
The current issues relate to a combination of a rising minimum wage attached to unlimited immigration that contributed to more and more work becoming minimum wage.
Germany imported 1 million immigrants in a year, and still maintains a tradition of far better wages and conditions in many sectors than the UK has had.
After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I 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.
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.
I think you keep using phrases like LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY and fancy words like "econometricians" to support your pre-existing beliefs which you don't have whole-hearted confidence in.
You had no answer to my question yesterday when I put it you that either: (a) a lack of EU free movement is pushing up wages due to labour shortages, or, (b) EU free movement had no effect on wages, except to benefit them, when we had all the labour we needed.
They can't both be true. So which is it?
Wage increases arising from a successful business in a benign environment, and wage increases necessitated by soaring costs are very different things.
I'll answer it: free labour expands the size of the economy at a macro-level because it's easier to leverage greater production more quickly at lower cost to resource intensive businesses, and that will have a multiplier effect at the national level - it will keep costs of their products and services down giving some people more money in their pockets to spend.
However, it will also - at the same time - keep wages low in those same jobs, defer investment in automation and equipment, lead to concentrated immigration in certain areas, create demand pressures on infrastructure, housing and public services, and - sadly - some social tensions.
This is why we had such low unemployment and modest growth during the Cameron years, but poor productivity growth and very low real wage growth - most of the new jobs went to EU workers, and it was largely those in more globalised professional jobs that benefited.
Anybody reading this thread would be tempted to think that in the olden days, before the EU, FOM and imported labour, British employers paid the working class generous wages that have only been undercut since we joined the EU (and then later when we imported workers from the accession countries). It's laughable - low wages have always been at the forefront of British capitalism, and it was only in the heavily unionised sectors that manual workers could bargain for higher wages. Why do people think London Transport and others were so keen on the Windrush immigrants? I suspect that the decline of the power of trades unions has more to do with the low wages in many sectors than imported labour.
Anyway, it's great to see so many Tories now advocating higher wages for the working class. At least something we can all agree on.
No, low wages haven't always been at the forefront. Indeed its worth comparing with house prices, the largest cost coming from someone's wages nowadays tends to be their rent/mortgage but twenty years ago the ratio between price and earnings was much lower. So people were better off.
Then we had decades of increasing prices (with people claiming that was prosperity) while holding wages down (claiming that was inflation).
Riddle me this: If you're paying your rent or mortgage do you think that being a higher share of your wages than it was two decades ago makes you more or less prosperous?
After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?
I don't generally like the House of Lords as an idea but having somewhere where politicians can go after they retire to drink and talk about politics and make speeches and continue to feel important seems like a useful way to make them let go. The UK shouldn't abolish the HoL, they should make it purely ceremonial like the Monarchy and just slot in a new thing underneath to do the actual work.
The Senate is basically the US equivalent of the House of Lords (the House of Representatives is the US equivalent of the House of Commons). The fact Senators are elected only ever 6 years means they tend to take a longer term view of legislation rather than short term political considerations like Representatives. Hence it is full of elder statesmen like the Lords is (McCain was a Senator until he died) and if the Lords was ever elected it should equally only be for longer terms of 6 years or more so its function as a revising chamber is not changed.
That’s correct, and until a century ago US Senators were not popularly elected but appointed by the legislature of their state. The US Constitution is at heart the 18th century British constitution with all the hereditary elements removed and the then still evolving concept of executive responsibility to a supreme legislature replaced with the Enlightenment doctrine of strict separation of powers.
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.
I think you keep using phrases like LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY and fancy words like "econometricians" to support your pre-existing beliefs which you don't have whole-hearted confidence in.
You had no answer to my question yesterday when I put it you that either: (a) a lack of EU free movement is pushing up wages due to labour shortages, or, (b) EU free movement had no effect on wages, except to benefit them, when we had all the labour we needed.
They can't both be true. So which is it?
Wage increases arising from a successful business in a benign environment, and wage increases necessitated by soaring costs are very different things.
I'll answer it: free labour expands the size of the economy at a macro-level because it's easier to leverage greater production more quickly at lower cost to resource intensive businesses, and that will have a multiplier effect at the national level - it will keep costs of their products and services down giving some people more money in their pockets to spend.
However, it will also - at the same time - keep wages low in those same jobs, defer investment in automation and equipment, lead to concentrated immigration in certain areas, create demand pressures on infrastructure, housing and public services, and - sadly - some social tensions.
This is why we had such low unemployment and modest growth during the Cameron years, but poor productivity growth and very low real wage growth - most of the new jobs went to EU workers, and it was largely those in more globalised professional jobs that benefited.
All hidden by a focus on GDP while completely ignoring GDP per capita details (which were wrong anyway as we had seemingly seriously underestimated immigration numbers).
After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?
After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?
Laugh as much as you like, I'm the one with 80 litres of diesel in the tank and all Tavistock's remaining supplies of tonic water in the larder.
I know people love to get Trans issues into every debate but what does a sex change clinic need tonic water for? 😉
It's dangerous stuff, Clarissa Dickson Wright drank two bottles of gin a day for years and ended up being poisoned by the tonic water. Steer clear altogether or be sure to dilute it with plenty of Tanqueray.
I can relate to that from when I was younger and used to go clubbing. I could drink 15 bottles of beer or alcopops in a nightclub and be on top of the world but after eating a dodgy kebab on the way home you might not feel too good the next morning.
I don't generally like the House of Lords as an idea but having somewhere where politicians can go after they retire to drink and talk about politics and make speeches and continue to feel important seems like a useful way to make them let go. The UK shouldn't abolish the HoL, they should make it purely ceremonial like the Monarchy and just slot in a new thing underneath to do the actual work.
The Senate is basically the US equivalent of the House of Lords (the House of Representatives is the US equivalent of the House of Commons). The fact Senators are elected only ever 6 years means they tend to take a longer term view of legislation rather than short term political considerations like Representatives. Hence it is full of elder statesmen like the Lords is (McCain was a Senator until he died) and if the Lords was ever elected it should equally only be for longer terms of 6 years or more so its function as a revising chamber is not changed.
That’s correct, and until a century ago US Senators were not popularly elected but appointed by the legislature of their state. The US Constitution is at heart the 18th century British constitution with all the hereditary elements removed and the then still evolving concept of executive responsibility to a supreme legislature replaced with the Enlightenment doctrine of strict separation of powers.
Weirdly the states have flipped the whole design around. The Senate is popularly elected and the House is chosen by each legislature via gerrymandering.
I see that some arch-remainers who have never met anyone who voted for Brexit in their lives are still insisting that they know more about why people voted for Brexit than the voters themselves. Way to lose an argument!
On topic, I imagine at the moment, most of those who voted for Brexit are more than happy with the current state of affairs - a buoyant jobs market where employees hold the whip hand and are able to demand better wages, greater job security and better working conditions. A few empty shelves at a supermarket or a few pumps out of service at the petrol station from time to time will do little to dampen their enthusiasm. However, if these issues become more serious then perceptions will change very quickly, and it will become very problematic for the government.
At the moment, it's probably too early and difficult to assess how serious the issue is. Of course, rich employers (including the rich moguls who own most of the media) are adversely affected by an employee's market and therefore we should expect tales of woe to be planted across our media on a regular basis and problems to be routinely exaggerated - but that doesn't mean there's no truth to them at all.
However, it does seem that arch-remainers are a bit too desperate for these issues to become serious - which is pretty unedifying in itself - while many arch-brexiteers are rather too quick to dismiss the issues out of hand.
As ever, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
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.
I think you keep using phrases like LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY and fancy words like "econometricians" to support your pre-existing beliefs which you don't have whole-hearted confidence in.
You had no answer to my question yesterday when I put it you that either: (a) a lack of EU free movement is pushing up wages due to labour shortages, or, (b) EU free movement had no effect on wages, except to benefit them, when we had all the labour we needed.
They can't both be true. So which is it?
Wage increases arising from a successful business in a benign environment, and wage increases necessitated by soaring costs are very different things.
I'll answer it: free labour expands the size of the economy at a macro-level because it's easier to leverage greater production more quickly at lower cost to resource intensive businesses, and that will have a multiplier effect at the national level - it will keep costs of their products and services down giving some people more money in their pockets to spend.
However, it will also - at the same time - keep wages low in those same jobs, defer investment in automation and equipment, lead to concentrated immigration in certain areas, create demand pressures on infrastructure, housing and public services, and - sadly - some social tensions.
This is why we had such low unemployment and modest growth during the Cameron years, but poor productivity growth and very low real wage growth - most of the new jobs went to EU workers, and it was largely those in more globalised professional jobs that benefited.
Yup, employers, such as M&S, had discovered that the game had been rigged in their favour and, even better, anyone who spoke out against said rigging of the game could be denounced as racist.
We're now seeing the derangement from those people who lost the argument ratchet up and reality denied as they go down swinging but they lost and they know it. Wages at the bottom are rising.
AA President Edmund King says there is no shortage of fuel and thousands of petrol stations are operating normally with just a few suffering temporary supply chain problems
Tesco offering drivers a £1,000 sign on to come to work for them
Small print applies ie half after 3 months half after 6 months
My step son says his mate drives for Tesco, £21.40 an hour, the problem he says is not the drivers, they can’t get the cheap Labour on minimum wage to work night shifts loading the lorries.
"What self respecting person would work nights for minimum wage"
back when the dinosaurs roamed and I was young, nights was time-and-a-half or often double-time. Same with working in pubs on the weekend.
Double pay on bank holidays! Triple time to work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day!
I think most places still do it.
Most don't actually - they've shifted their T&Cs to being normal pay because until now there was always someone else willing to do the job.
Wow, what idiot would work on a bank holiday without double time then?!
I once did a shift behind the bar* on Christmas Day. Not only was I being payed extra wedge, but people kept buying me drinks.
*In a Working Men's Club. Not some posho wine bar. Keeping it real.
After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?
James Melville @JamesMelville · 15h Sweden has announced they will not implement vaccine passports. Hats off to Sweden. Again. #NoVaccinePassports Heart suitFlag of Sweden
Least surprising news of the day?
In other news, googling that, Sweden is apparently going to remove its remaining Covid restrictions this month. Only two and a bit months after the UK...
(Yes, I know for long periods they had looser restrictions than us and never had anything matching our tightest restrictions)
Officially, London had sought to calm the situation, but privately, it was dismissive of the French complaints, arguing that Paris had spent years reassuring itself that Brexit would be a disaster, and had therefore failed to practice even basic diplomacy to understand how London might seek to protect its influence and standing. One senior British official close to Johnson, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to describe government deliberations, told me that French diplomats spent so long listening to people in London who agreed with their view—that Brexit would see Britain sidelined in the world—that they failed to recognize what the U.K. would do to remain a central part of the Western alliance. “If all your ambassadors do is read the pages of the FT, don’t be surprised if the ‘fifth wheel’ is actually still attached to the car,” the official said.
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.
After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?
Laugh as much as you like, I'm the one with 80 litres of diesel in the tank and all Tavistock's remaining supplies of tonic water in the larder.
I know people love to get Trans issues into every debate but what does a sex change clinic need tonic water for? 😉
It's dangerous stuff, Clarissa Dickson Wright drank two bottles of gin a day for years and ended up being poisoned by the tonic water. Steer clear altogether or be sure to dilute it with plenty of Tanqueray.
I can relate to that from when I was younger and used to go clubbing. I could drink 15 bottles of beer or alcopops in a nightclub and be on top of the world but after eating a dodgy kebab on the way home you might not feel too good the next morning.
But it was for real in her case - she buggered up her adrenal gland with quinine poisoning from the tonic.
After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?
Laugh as much as you like, I'm the one with 80 litres of diesel in the tank and all Tavistock's remaining supplies of tonic water in the larder.
I know people love to get Trans issues into every debate but what does a sex change clinic need tonic water for? 😉
It's dangerous stuff, Clarissa Dickson Wright drank two bottles of gin a day for years and ended up being poisoned by the tonic water. Steer clear altogether or be sure to dilute it with plenty of Tanqueray.
I can relate to that from when I was younger and used to go clubbing. I could drink 15 bottles of beer or alcopops in a nightclub and be on top of the world but after eating a dodgy kebab on the way home you might not feel too good the next morning.
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.
I think you keep using phrases like LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY and fancy words like "econometricians" to support your pre-existing beliefs which you don't have whole-hearted confidence in.
You had no answer to my question yesterday when I put it you that either: (a) a lack of EU free movement is pushing up wages due to labour shortages, or, (b) EU free movement had no effect on wages, except to benefit them, when we had all the labour we needed.
They can't both be true. So which is it?
Wage increases arising from a successful business in a benign environment, and wage increases necessitated by soaring costs are very different things.
I'll answer it: free labour expands the size of the economy at a macro-level because it's easier to leverage greater production more quickly at lower cost to resource intensive businesses, and that will have a multiplier effect at the national level - it will keep costs of their products and services down giving some people more money in their pockets to spend.
However, it will also - at the same time - keep wages low in those same jobs, defer investment in automation and equipment, lead to concentrated immigration in certain areas, create demand pressures on infrastructure, housing and public services, and - sadly - some social tensions.
This is why we had such low unemployment and modest growth during the Cameron years, but poor productivity growth and very low real wage growth - most of the new jobs went to EU workers, and it was largely those in more globalised professional jobs that benefited.
I'm not sure where the money for this investment in automation and equipment is coming from if employers are now compelled to hire for vastly inflated wages. More likely each new-hire will be expected to do the work hitherto done by three. Something always has to give, and it's never the MD replacing his Jag with a push bike.
After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?
Laugh as much as you like, I'm the one with 80 litres of diesel in the tank and all Tavistock's remaining supplies of tonic water in the larder.
I know people love to get Trans issues into every debate but what does a sex change clinic need tonic water for? 😉
It's dangerous stuff, Clarissa Dickson Wright drank two bottles of gin a day for years and ended up being poisoned by the tonic water. Steer clear altogether or be sure to dilute it with plenty of Tanqueray.
I can relate to that from when I was younger and used to go clubbing. I could drink 15 bottles of beer or alcopops in a nightclub and be on top of the world but after eating a dodgy kebab on the way home you might not feel too good the next morning.
But it was for real in her case - she buggered up her adrenal gland with quinine poisoning from the tonic.
Oh I did not know that sorry, I thought it was a joke.
After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?
Will only go ahead if Electoral College passes i assume
Must be tricky for the anti-Starmer wing. Do you: (a) vote against the electoral college reforms to defeat and humiliate Starmer? (b) vote for them, so that Wes Streeting can then defeat and humiliate Starmer? (semi serious - voting for strengthens Starmer, outwardly, voting against weakens him)
More seriously, what's your position on Streeting?
Officially, London had sought to calm the situation, but privately, it was dismissive of the French complaints, arguing that Paris had spent years reassuring itself that Brexit would be a disaster, and had therefore failed to practice even basic diplomacy to understand how London might seek to protect its influence and standing. One senior British official close to Johnson, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to describe government deliberations, told me that French diplomats spent so long listening to people in London who agreed with their view—that Brexit would see Britain sidelined in the world—that they failed to recognize what the U.K. would do to remain a central part of the Western alliance. “If all your ambassadors do is read the pages of the FT, don’t be surprised if the ‘fifth wheel’ is actually still attached to the car,” the official said.
After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?
Laugh as much as you like, I'm the one with 80 litres of diesel in the tank and all Tavistock's remaining supplies of tonic water in the larder.
I know people love to get Trans issues into every debate but what does a sex change clinic need tonic water for? 😉
It's dangerous stuff, Clarissa Dickson Wright drank two bottles of gin a day for years and ended up being poisoned by the tonic water. Steer clear altogether or be sure to dilute it with plenty of Tanqueray.
I can relate to that from when I was younger and used to go clubbing. I could drink 15 bottles of beer or alcopops in a nightclub and be on top of the world but after eating a dodgy kebab on the way home you might not feel too good the next morning.
But it was for real in her case - she buggered up her adrenal gland with quinine poisoning from the tonic.
Oh I did not know that sorry, I thought it was a joke.
I feel bad now.
Nah, she thought it was funny a.f., and it wasn't what killed her.
Officially, London had sought to calm the situation, but privately, it was dismissive of the French complaints, arguing that Paris had spent years reassuring itself that Brexit would be a disaster, and had therefore failed to practice even basic diplomacy to understand how London might seek to protect its influence and standing. One senior British official close to Johnson, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to describe government deliberations, told me that French diplomats spent so long listening to people in London who agreed with their view—that Brexit would see Britain sidelined in the world—that they failed to recognize what the U.K. would do to remain a central part of the Western alliance. “If all your ambassadors do is read the pages of the FT, don’t be surprised if the ‘fifth wheel’ is actually still attached to the car,” the official said.
After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?
After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?
Laugh as much as you like, I'm the one with 80 litres of diesel in the tank and all Tavistock's remaining supplies of tonic water in the larder.
I know people love to get Trans issues into every debate but what does a sex change clinic need tonic water for? 😉
It's dangerous stuff, Clarissa Dickson Wright drank two bottles of gin a day for years and ended up being poisoned by the tonic water. Steer clear altogether or be sure to dilute it with plenty of Tanqueray.
I can relate to that from when I was younger and used to go clubbing. I could drink 15 bottles of beer or alcopops in a nightclub and be on top of the world but after eating a dodgy kebab on the way home you might not feel too good the next morning.
But it was for real in her case - she buggered up her adrenal gland with quinine poisoning from the tonic.
I had a friend who was advised to lay off the bitter lemon in his (copious) gin consumption cos it was destroying his teeth and possibly the cause of pre cancerous cells in his mouth. He did that but still carked it with the big C, though tbf that was probably the 40 a day Silk Cut..
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.
I think you keep using phrases like LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY and fancy words like "econometricians" to support your pre-existing beliefs which you don't have whole-hearted confidence in.
You had no answer to my question yesterday when I put it you that either: (a) a lack of EU free movement is pushing up wages due to labour shortages, or, (b) EU free movement had no effect on wages, except to benefit them, when we had all the labour we needed.
They can't both be true. So which is it?
Wage increases arising from a successful business in a benign environment, and wage increases necessitated by soaring costs are very different things.
I'll answer it: free labour expands the size of the economy at a macro-level because it's easier to leverage greater production more quickly at lower cost to resource intensive businesses, and that will have a multiplier effect at the national level - it will keep costs of their products and services down giving some people more money in their pockets to spend.
However, it will also - at the same time - keep wages low in those same jobs, defer investment in automation and equipment, lead to concentrated immigration in certain areas, create demand pressures on infrastructure, housing and public services, and - sadly - some social tensions.
This is why we had such low unemployment and modest growth during the Cameron years, but poor productivity growth and very low real wage growth - most of the new jobs went to EU workers, and it was largely those in more globalised professional jobs that benefited.
I'm not sure where the money for this investment in automation and equipment is coming from if employers are now compelled to hire for vastly inflated wages. More likely each new-hire will be expected to do the work hitherto done by three. Something always has to give, and it's never the MD replacing his Jag with a push bike.
When I visited JCB recently (one of their depots, actually), they are working round the clock and orders are piling up. Someone is buying an awful lot of machinery.
Given I was there related to an investment in equipment inspired by the massive tax incentive in the recent budget....
Officially, London had sought to calm the situation, but privately, it was dismissive of the French complaints, arguing that Paris had spent years reassuring itself that Brexit would be a disaster, and had therefore failed to practice even basic diplomacy to understand how London might seek to protect its influence and standing. One senior British official close to Johnson, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to describe government deliberations, told me that French diplomats spent so long listening to people in London who agreed with their view—that Brexit would see Britain sidelined in the world—that they failed to recognize what the U.K. would do to remain a central part of the Western alliance. “If all your ambassadors do is read the pages of the FT, don’t be surprised if the ‘fifth wheel’ is actually still attached to the car,” the official said.
Officially, London had sought to calm the situation, but privately, it was dismissive of the French complaints, arguing that Paris had spent years reassuring itself that Brexit would be a disaster, and had therefore failed to practice even basic diplomacy to understand how London might seek to protect its influence and standing. One senior British official close to Johnson, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to describe government deliberations, told me that French diplomats spent so long listening to people in London who agreed with their view—that Brexit would see Britain sidelined in the world—that they failed to recognize what the U.K. would do to remain a central part of the Western alliance. “If all your ambassadors do is read the pages of the FT, don’t be surprised if the ‘fifth wheel’ is actually still attached to the car,” the official said.
Florida Republicans now looking at rescinding measles & mumps vaccine requirements, while continuing to spread disinformation that the Covid vaccine isn't "proven to work" https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1441071490489856002
AA President Edmund King says there is no shortage of fuel and thousands of petrol stations are operating normally with just a few suffering temporary supply chain problems
Hope this guy's more reliable than the predecessor of his who brawled with his sales director in a Basingstoke bar.
Florida Republicans now looking at rescinding measles & mumps vaccine requirements, while continuing to spread disinformation that the Covid vaccine isn't "proven to work" https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1441071490489856002
Measles is one of the biggest childhood killers.
To be fair, it is good progress in finally reducing the percentage of children killed by guns.
Officially, London had sought to calm the situation, but privately, it was dismissive of the French complaints, arguing that Paris had spent years reassuring itself that Brexit would be a disaster, and had therefore failed to practice even basic diplomacy to understand how London might seek to protect its influence and standing. One senior British official close to Johnson, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to describe government deliberations, told me that French diplomats spent so long listening to people in London who agreed with their view—that Brexit would see Britain sidelined in the world—that they failed to recognize what the U.K. would do to remain a central part of the Western alliance. “If all your ambassadors do is read the pages of the FT, don’t be surprised if the ‘fifth wheel’ is actually still attached to the car,” the official said.
Given what I've read about French diplomats to the UK, I'm surprised any of them are still in a job.
Their approach would make Jo Maugham blush.
Ever tried to fire someone in France?
Easier just to send then to a subsidy where they can do little harm....
Part of the problem will be group think - diplomacy often falls into the trap of hearing what you want. And actively suppressing the other noises....
Before the Falklands, an MI6 agent in Argentina warned that something was up. The FO response was to suppress his reports and try and get him fired, so that reports wouldn't reach ministers and upset the FO internal policy on the Falklands.
They were still trying to crush his career *after* Port Stanley was recaptured.
After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?
Will only go ahead if Electoral College passes i assume
Must be tricky for the anti-Starmer wing. Do you: (a) vote against the electoral college reforms to defeat and humiliate Starmer? (b) vote for them, so that Wes Streeting can then defeat and humiliate Starmer? (semi serious - voting for strengthens Starmer, outwardly, voting against weakens him)
More seriously, what's your position on Streeting?
No longer a member so no say on the matter.
Had i still been a member i would not be voting for him under any foreseeable circumstance
Jake Brown, a 27-year-old former non-league footballer, founded Avro Energy in 2014 while studying law at Birmingham University
The collapse of Avro’s consumer division on Wednesday was the biggest failure yet seen of a household supplier
Jake's father Andrew joined the business in 2017. The pair do not appear to have invested any of their own money in the company, which has been financed by the advance fees paid by customers. Each owns half the shares in Avro Group, the holding company for a string of businesses
AA President Edmund King says there is no shortage of fuel and thousands of petrol stations are operating normally with just a few suffering temporary supply chain problems
Hope this guy's more reliable than the predecessor of his who brawled with his sales director in a Basingstoke bar.
He is being quoted on Sky and both Sky and BBC are confirming that there is no fuel shortage and only a small number of service stations are suffering supply problems
AA President Edmund King says there is no shortage of fuel and thousands of petrol stations are operating normally with just a few suffering temporary supply chain problems
Hope this guy's more reliable than the predecessor of his who brawled with his sales director in a Basingstoke bar.
He is being quoted on Sky and both Sky and BBC are confirming that there is no fuel shortage and only a small number of service stations are suffering supply problems
Anecdata: I drove past my local BP garage on the way back from my run. It is normally fairly quiet (compared to the nearby Mossies petrol station), but every lane was queuing.
On another note: yesterday I reached 2,000 miles run this year. Obsessive, moi?
Florida Republicans now looking at rescinding measles & mumps vaccine requirements, while continuing to spread disinformation that the Covid vaccine isn't "proven to work" https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1441071490489856002
Measles is one of the biggest childhood killers.
To be fair, it is good progress in finally reducing the percentage of children killed by guns.
There's that. OTOH, measles infection wipes immune memory (which is why it's a killer), so if an outbreak is sufficiently widespread, we might even get a whole new Covid wave sometime in the future.
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.
Economics isn't really a hard science but econometric techniques, if applied properly, can yield useful insights. Simply dismissing their arguments because you disagree with their findings just makes you look silly. Plenty of economists do work in finance of course, and some of them are doing quite well out of it (cough). It's by no means the bad ones who stay in academia either. If anything it's a profession where wages tend to be inversely related to talent at the top, in my experience, because the best economists tend to gravitate towards academia and research careers.
I don't disagree with any of that and I'm not dismissing the idea of the lump of labour fallacy, in fact I think it's probably correct and it's also why I think trade deals are a net good. My issue has always been the blind spot from academics who overwhelmingly support unlimited immigration on wages at the bottom of the market. Wages for people like me going up by 20% *may* create a trickle down effect to raise wages at the bottom, the evidence is not particularly clear on that, but we do know that people like me do well in a high immigration environment and wages at the top rising quickly does also result in higher overall GDP and better overall productivity. Those are probably close to fact.
However, and there obviously is one, you can't simply apply the same theory to the bottom of the market where investment in productivity is low, the supply of labour is high and the barrier to entry non-existent. The market is totally different and it's increasingly obvious that the gains from EU immigration were made at the top (people like us) and those people at the bottom saw years of wage stagnation. That we're now seeing record wage inflation at the bottom does rather prove that quite emphatically. What I'm not saying and haven't said is that this will result to any increase in GDP, personally I don't think it will, it may lead to an overall reduction in GDP and maybe even GDP per capita.
My main point is that I don't think GDP or GDP per capita is a particular valuable or important statistic, I'd rather have a lower GDP with the national income properly distributed than a very high one with the top 5% of people having an economic share of 40% and the bottom 20% of people having just 5% or whatever income inequality is at the moment. If it means I have to pay more for my coffee or my restaurant bill goes up a bit then that's probably worth it for people who serve me my coffee and bring the food to my table to earn a proper living wage.
I agree with all of that. I would like to see a lasting compression of incomes but I am sceptical that Brexit will deliver it, and I think there are plenty of other policy changes that could deliver it with less collateral damage to the economy and without reducing people's rights and opportunities as Brexit has. I am also sceptical of all this championing of the lower paid from the kind of people who would normally cross the road to piss on the working class.
That's not fair. Most of us (very few exceptions) genuinely want to see the working class do well.
The difference is in how we think that should be achieved.
For instance I have long argued we should lower real tax rates on the poorest in society instead of relying upon tax and redistribution. Now for people who believe in redistribution as the solution that may sound like piss, but it isn't.
Its the old 'teach a man to fish' analogy. Those who advocate 'teaching a man to fish' aren't advocating pushing him in the water and letting him drown or starve.
I too think that those who earn the least should pay very little tax. However others think that paying some tax is part of the social contract - its showing that stuffs costs money. The NHS costs money etc. Its the old issue with prescriptions - if you don't pay for them, you perhaps value them less and don't worry if you don't use the meds. I know of people who get the repeats month after month, despite no longer needing/using them. They wouldn't do that if they paid for them. (I'm not arguing that everyone should pay, by the way.) And yet we do all pay tax - VAT, but in the UK we hide that. The American system where the state tax etc is added on to the display price is one example.
Jake Brown, a 27-year-old former non-league footballer, founded Avro Energy in 2014 while studying law at Birmingham University
The collapse of Avro’s consumer division on Wednesday was the biggest failure yet seen of a household supplier
Jake's father Andrew joined the business in 2017. The pair do not appear to have invested any of their own money in the company, which has been financed by the advance fees paid by customers. Each owns half the shares in Avro Group, the holding company for a string of businesses
Sounds rather ponzi-scheme light....we have no money, no investment, we rely on new money coming in. No wonder they weren't hedging.
The big question is: what the hell was the regulator (OFGEM) doing? Did they not even do two minutes due diligence before granting Avro's Electricity Supply Licence?
Jake Brown, a 27-year-old former non-league footballer, founded Avro Energy in 2014 while studying law at Birmingham University
The collapse of Avro’s consumer division on Wednesday was the biggest failure yet seen of a household supplier
Jake's father Andrew joined the business in 2017. The pair do not appear to have invested any of their own money in the company, which has been financed by the advance fees paid by customers. Each owns half the shares in Avro Group, the holding company for a string of businesses
Sounds rather ponzi-scheme light....we have no money, no investment, we rely on new money coming in. No wonder they weren't hedging.
The big question is: what the hell was the regulator (OFGEM) doing? Did they not even do two minutes due diligence before granting Avro's Electricity Supply Licence?
Probably run by the same people who run the Gambling Commission.....Football Index, seems a solid idea to us....
Jake Brown, a 27-year-old former non-league footballer, founded Avro Energy in 2014 while studying law at Birmingham University
The collapse of Avro’s consumer division on Wednesday was the biggest failure yet seen of a household supplier
Jake's father Andrew joined the business in 2017. The pair do not appear to have invested any of their own money in the company, which has been financed by the advance fees paid by customers. Each owns half the shares in Avro Group, the holding company for a string of businesses
Sounds rather ponzi-scheme light....we have no money, no investment, we rely on new money coming in. No wonder they weren't hedging.
The big question is: what the hell was the regulator (OFGEM) doing? Did they not even do two minutes due diligence before granting Avro's Electricity Supply Licence?
Indeed.
My suspicion is they went really light on regulating these businesses with funny names because the politicians wanted to see a really active market full of supposed choice. Of course we now see the whole thing was an illusion.
More than half of U.K. adults say they have faced more difficulties than usual shopping for food over the past two weeks, according to an official survey https://trib.al/uXYRWyB
James Melville @JamesMelville · 15h Sweden has announced they will not implement vaccine passports. Hats off to Sweden. Again. #NoVaccinePassports Heart suitFlag of Sweden
Least surprising news of the day?
In other news, googling that, Sweden is apparently going to remove its remaining Covid restrictions this month. Only two and a bit months after the UK...
(Yes, I know for long periods they had looser restrictions than us and never had anything matching our tightest restrictions)
Isn't the point of vaccine passports to provide pressure on the unvaccinated, as happened in France?
Jake Brown, a 27-year-old former non-league footballer, founded Avro Energy in 2014 while studying law at Birmingham University
The collapse of Avro’s consumer division on Wednesday was the biggest failure yet seen of a household supplier
Jake's father Andrew joined the business in 2017. The pair do not appear to have invested any of their own money in the company, which has been financed by the advance fees paid by customers. Each owns half the shares in Avro Group, the holding company for a string of businesses
Sounds rather ponzi-scheme light....we have no money, no investment, we rely on new money coming in. No wonder they weren't hedging.
The big question is: what the hell was the regulator (OFGEM) doing? Did they not even do two minutes due diligence before granting Avro's Electricity Supply Licence?
Indeed.
My suspicion is they went really light on regulating these businesses with funny names because the politicians wanted to see a really active market full of supposed choice. Of course we now see the whole thing was an illusion.
I was wondering how a sector could go from a big 6 plus a small number of niche providers e.g. only using renewables, to 80+ companies in the space of a few years.
I think it has become clear now, no money down, business model based upon taking payment upfront, no hedging, no obvious signs you a suitable for such a business, no problemo says the authorities.
Labour, my party, the only party with an interest in fighting class privilege, whither we?
I'm most familiar with the Owen Jones recipe and I like it. But today I read Mandy's take - as below - and I like this too. Are they are at odds and so me liking both shows my utter confusion? No. They are ying and yang. It's about fusing modernity and radicalism. I'd like to see both of them in Starmer's first cabinet.
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!
Ooh, I have just seen the FIVE unicorns you have shown me happily grazing on the filling station forecourt lawn as I queued to panic buy 50 litres of diesel.
Jake Brown, a 27-year-old former non-league footballer, founded Avro Energy in 2014 while studying law at Birmingham University
The collapse of Avro’s consumer division on Wednesday was the biggest failure yet seen of a household supplier
Jake's father Andrew joined the business in 2017. The pair do not appear to have invested any of their own money in the company, which has been financed by the advance fees paid by customers. Each owns half the shares in Avro Group, the holding company for a string of businesses
Sounds rather ponzi-scheme light....we have no money, no investment, we rely on new money coming in. No wonder they weren't hedging.
The big question is: what the hell was the regulator (OFGEM) doing? Did they not even do two minutes due diligence before granting Avro's Electricity Supply Licence?
Curiouser and curiouser. Possibly Ofgem warned the government. Government took no notice. Ofgem leaked to Ed Miliband.
Owen Paterson @OwenPaterson 1h I'm proud to be a Spartan. Our determination to resist extraordinary pressure & consistently vote against bad deals has made British democracy much freer to make its own decisions. Eg 1.9m UK citizens in NI have not fully left EU & much still to do in other areas such as fishing.
Jake Brown, a 27-year-old former non-league footballer, founded Avro Energy in 2014 while studying law at Birmingham University
The collapse of Avro’s consumer division on Wednesday was the biggest failure yet seen of a household supplier
Jake's father Andrew joined the business in 2017. The pair do not appear to have invested any of their own money in the company, which has been financed by the advance fees paid by customers. Each owns half the shares in Avro Group, the holding company for a string of businesses
Sounds rather ponzi-scheme light....we have no money, no investment, we rely on new money coming in. No wonder they weren't hedging.
The big question is: what the hell was the regulator (OFGEM) doing? Did they not even do two minutes due diligence before granting Avro's Electricity Supply Licence?
Curiouser and curiouser. Possibly Ofgem warned the government. Government took no notice. Ofgem leaked to Ed Miliband.
Jake Brown, a 27-year-old former non-league footballer, founded Avro Energy in 2014 while studying law at Birmingham University
The collapse of Avro’s consumer division on Wednesday was the biggest failure yet seen of a household supplier
Jake's father Andrew joined the business in 2017. The pair do not appear to have invested any of their own money in the company, which has been financed by the advance fees paid by customers. Each owns half the shares in Avro Group, the holding company for a string of businesses
Sounds rather ponzi-scheme light....we have no money, no investment, we rely on new money coming in. No wonder they weren't hedging.
The big question is: what the hell was the regulator (OFGEM) doing? Did they not even do two minutes due diligence before granting Avro's Electricity Supply Licence?
Probably run by the same people who run the Gambling Commission.....Football Index, seems a solid idea to us....
Also the FCA & Lendy, Savingstream....
Now these are businesses where I punted (And got out ahead due to bonus clearing & err panicking early) based on pawnbroking & charges over properties. Never mind the paintings not being sold for valuation at auction, in plenty of cases Savingstream didn't even have the physical painting; and the RICS valuations for Lendy were frankly fraudulent.
Yet the FCA seems determined to go after cryptocurrencies, specifically Binance. Now you may well lose your shirt in Crypto, but the currencies are all at least there in the various blockchains unlike all the above...
Jake Brown, a 27-year-old former non-league footballer, founded Avro Energy in 2014 while studying law at Birmingham University
The collapse of Avro’s consumer division on Wednesday was the biggest failure yet seen of a household supplier
Jake's father Andrew joined the business in 2017. The pair do not appear to have invested any of their own money in the company, which has been financed by the advance fees paid by customers. Each owns half the shares in Avro Group, the holding company for a string of businesses
Sounds rather ponzi-scheme light....we have no money, no investment, we rely on new money coming in. No wonder they weren't hedging.
The big question is: what the hell was the regulator (OFGEM) doing? Did they not even do two minutes due diligence before granting Avro's Electricity Supply Licence?
Curiouser and curiouser. Possibly Ofgem warned the government. Government took no notice. Ofgem leaked to Ed Miliband.
James Melville @JamesMelville · 15h Sweden has announced they will not implement vaccine passports. Hats off to Sweden. Again. #NoVaccinePassports Heart suitFlag of Sweden
Least surprising news of the day?
In other news, googling that, Sweden is apparently going to remove its remaining Covid restrictions this month. Only two and a bit months after the UK...
(Yes, I know for long periods they had looser restrictions than us and never had anything matching our tightest restrictions)
Isn't the point of vaccine passports to provide pressure on the unvaccinated, as happened in France?
My quick google (I didn't find a good source for the OP tweet) suggested that Sweden had announced plans for a vaccine passport - may have just been for travel. If so, announcing then cancelling probably does the work for you (as here, arguably).
Jake Brown, a 27-year-old former non-league footballer, founded Avro Energy in 2014 while studying law at Birmingham University
The collapse of Avro’s consumer division on Wednesday was the biggest failure yet seen of a household supplier
Jake's father Andrew joined the business in 2017. The pair do not appear to have invested any of their own money in the company, which has been financed by the advance fees paid by customers. Each owns half the shares in Avro Group, the holding company for a string of businesses
Sounds rather ponzi-scheme light....we have no money, no investment, we rely on new money coming in. No wonder they weren't hedging.
The big question is: what the hell was the regulator (OFGEM) doing? Did they not even do two minutes due diligence before granting Avro's Electricity Supply Licence?
Curiouser and curiouser. Possibly Ofgem warned the government. Government took no notice. Ofgem leaked to Ed Miliband.
What an ideological bind. The official line is that Brexit is now a heroic quest for better working conditions, although it was originally conceived in exactly the opposite ideological spirit, but that's much too long-term a rhetoric to solve a current and pressing problem.
Jake Brown, a 27-year-old former non-league footballer, founded Avro Energy in 2014 while studying law at Birmingham University
The collapse of Avro’s consumer division on Wednesday was the biggest failure yet seen of a household supplier
Jake's father Andrew joined the business in 2017. The pair do not appear to have invested any of their own money in the company, which has been financed by the advance fees paid by customers. Each owns half the shares in Avro Group, the holding company for a string of businesses
Sounds rather ponzi-scheme light....we have no money, no investment, we rely on new money coming in. No wonder they weren't hedging.
The big question is: what the hell was the regulator (OFGEM) doing? Did they not even do two minutes due diligence before granting Avro's Electricity Supply Licence?
Probably run by the same people who run the Gambling Commission.....Football Index, seems a solid idea to us....
Also the FCA & Lendy, Savingstream....
Now these are businesses where I punted (And got out ahead due to bonus clearing & err panicking early) based on pawnbroking & charges over properties. Never mind the paintings not being sold for valuation at auction, in plenty of cases Savingstream didn't even have the physical painting; and the RICS valuations for Lendy were frankly fraudulent.
Yet the FCA seems determined to go after cryptocurrencies, specifically Binance. Now you may well lose your shirt in Crypto, but the currencies are all at least there in the various blockchains unlike all the above...
I think the particular issue with Binance is that there are 10,000 coins that have been created and they love to list any old shit on there. There are absolutely legit projects e.g. Solana, that are backed by big money, network can handle more transactions per second than VISA, but every one of those there are 100 that are scams.
Coinbase on the other hand are much more cautious over what they list, I think its only 50-60, and they never seem less in the crosshairs of UK regulators.
Binance also offer a whole load of financial products as well, loans, staking, etc. And again, quite a bit of it is on the lot more riskier end of things. BlockFi offers a smaller range of finances products, that look a lot more legit and again isn't in trouble in the UK.
Jake Brown, a 27-year-old former non-league footballer, founded Avro Energy in 2014 while studying law at Birmingham University
The collapse of Avro’s consumer division on Wednesday was the biggest failure yet seen of a household supplier
Jake's father Andrew joined the business in 2017. The pair do not appear to have invested any of their own money in the company, which has been financed by the advance fees paid by customers. Each owns half the shares in Avro Group, the holding company for a string of businesses
Sounds rather ponzi-scheme light....we have no money, no investment, we rely on new money coming in. No wonder they weren't hedging.
The big question is: what the hell was the regulator (OFGEM) doing? Did they not even do two minutes due diligence before granting Avro's Electricity Supply Licence?
Curiouser and curiouser. Possibly Ofgem warned the government. Government took no notice. Ofgem leaked to Ed Miliband.
It is a 50 (yes fifty) percent cap! The only place it will make any difference is prime central London, and then only marginally at 50% foreign ownership.
If it was a 10% cap it would make a difference. Increasing the foreign non resident surcharge significantly is the better solution.
Should thoroughly test the theory that Brits wont do this back breaking hard labour at any price.
Followed swiftly by how willing we are to pay 20 quid for a head of broccoli...
More likely, the broccoli just isn’t harvested and doesn’t make it to the shops. Nobody can buy that broccoli.
Result:
Less broccoli choice More expensive broccoli Fewer broccoli jobs More broccoli imports Fewer broccoli exports
Now repeat across the entire economy.
You forget: happier (if possibly less healthy) kids
(although my two actually eat broccoli very happily - pretty much at the top of their veg preference list, maybe after sweetcorn - it's supposed to be something they hate, isn't it?)
Jake Brown, a 27-year-old former non-league footballer, founded Avro Energy in 2014 while studying law at Birmingham University
The collapse of Avro’s consumer division on Wednesday was the biggest failure yet seen of a household supplier
Jake's father Andrew joined the business in 2017. The pair do not appear to have invested any of their own money in the company, which has been financed by the advance fees paid by customers. Each owns half the shares in Avro Group, the holding company for a string of businesses
Sounds rather ponzi-scheme light....we have no money, no investment, we rely on new money coming in. No wonder they weren't hedging.
The big question is: what the hell was the regulator (OFGEM) doing? Did they not even do two minutes due diligence before granting Avro's Electricity Supply Licence?
Curiouser and curiouser. Possibly Ofgem warned the government. Government took no notice. Ofgem leaked to Ed Miliband.
Key cabinet ministers meeting this afternoon to address driver shortages and visa scheme
The government need to have the courage of their Brexit convictions here. Tell the hauliers to offer higher wages, recruit the Billy Brits, or else get stuffed.
AA President Edmund King says there is no shortage of fuel and thousands of petrol stations are operating normally with just a few suffering temporary supply chain problems
Hope this guy's more reliable than the predecessor of his who brawled with his sales director in a Basingstoke bar.
He is being quoted on Sky and both Sky and BBC are confirming that there is no fuel shortage and only a small number of service stations are suffering supply problems
Anecdata: I drove past my local BP garage on the way back from my run. It is normally fairly quiet (compared to the nearby Mossies petrol station), but every lane was queuing.
On another note: yesterday I reached 2,000 miles run this year. Obsessive, moi?
Top work on the running. I was trying to walk or run 1000 for the year. Lockdown helped, now mostly back on campus and less done, so need another 400 miles by Dec 2021...
Key cabinet ministers meeting this afternoon to address driver shortages and visa scheme
The government need to have the courage of their Brexit convictions here. Tell the hauliers to offer higher wages, recruit the Billy Brits, or else get stuffed.
I don't think that's going to work, otherwise they wouldn't already be considering the about-face on visas.
That Shapps was doing the morning rounds suggests they are not yet for turning. When we get Sharma or Dowden defending the policy that is the indicator for the inevitable u-turn.
(At which point those cheering the government for holding firm today, will praise them for being pragmatic and flexible. It is a bit like umpires call in the cricket, whatever their decision, they will see the govt as correct.)
Should thoroughly test the theory that Brits wont do this back breaking hard labour at any price.
Followed swiftly by how willing we are to pay 20 quid for a head of broccoli...
More likely, the broccoli just isn’t harvested and doesn’t make it to the shops. Nobody can buy that broccoli.
Result:
Less broccoli choice More expensive broccoli Fewer broccoli jobs More broccoli imports Fewer broccoli exports
Now repeat across the entire economy.
You forget: happier (if possibly less healthy) kids
(although my two actually eat broccoli very happily - pretty much at the top of their veg preference list, maybe after sweetcorn - it's supposed to be something they hate, isn't it?)
I once introduced a teenager to purple sprouting broccoli, which I prefer to calabrese and, indeed, regard as a seasonal delicacy. She was unimpressed, expecting "little trees".
AA President Edmund King says there is no shortage of fuel and thousands of petrol stations are operating normally with just a few suffering temporary supply chain problems
It’s a civic duty really isn’t. Keep calm, carry on as normal, if anyone breaks habit and takes more the usual that’s what will cause the problem - depriving it from someone else.
More than half of U.K. adults say they have faced more difficulties than usual shopping for food over the past two weeks, according to an official survey https://trib.al/uXYRWyB
AA President Edmund King says there is no shortage of fuel and thousands of petrol stations are operating normally with just a few suffering temporary supply chain problems
It’s a civic duty really isn’t. Keep calm, carry on as normal, if anyone breaks habit and takes more the usual that’s what will cause the problem - depriving it from someone else.
Thankfully, people can't hoard petrol/diesel like they can do with toilet rolls (at least, most people can't/won't).
Should thoroughly test the theory that Brits wont do this back breaking hard labour at any price.
Followed swiftly by how willing we are to pay 20 quid for a head of broccoli...
More likely, the broccoli just isn’t harvested and doesn’t make it to the shops. Nobody can buy that broccoli.
Result:
Less broccoli choice More expensive broccoli Fewer broccoli jobs More broccoli imports Fewer broccoli exports
Now repeat across the entire economy.
You forget: happier (if possibly less healthy) kids
(although my two actually eat broccoli very happily - pretty much at the top of their veg preference list, maybe after sweetcorn - it's supposed to be something they hate, isn't it?)
I like broccoli, but the wife does not. She prefers cauliflower. Hence we tend to have mismatched plates - hers mostly white, mine mostly green... And don't start on the sprouts...
Comments
However, it will also - at the same time - keep wages low in those same jobs, defer investment in automation and equipment, lead to concentrated immigration in certain areas, create demand pressures on infrastructure, housing and public services, and - sadly - some social tensions.
This is why we had such low unemployment and modest growth during the Cameron years, but poor productivity growth and very low real wage growth - most of the new jobs went to EU workers, and it was largely those in more globalised professional jobs that benefited.
Then we had decades of increasing prices (with people claiming that was prosperity) while holding wages down (claiming that was inflation).
Riddle me this: If you're paying your rent or mortgage do you think that being a higher share of your wages than it was two decades ago makes you more or less prosperous?
On topic, I imagine at the moment, most of those who voted for Brexit are more than happy with the current state of affairs - a buoyant jobs market where employees hold the whip hand and are able to demand better wages, greater job security and better working conditions. A few empty shelves at a supermarket or a few pumps out of service at the petrol station from time to time will do little to dampen their enthusiasm. However, if these issues become more serious then perceptions will change very quickly, and it will become very problematic for the government.
At the moment, it's probably too early and difficult to assess how serious the issue is. Of course, rich employers (including the rich moguls who own most of the media) are adversely affected by an employee's market and therefore we should expect tales of woe to be planted across our media on a regular basis and problems to be routinely exaggerated - but that doesn't mean there's no truth to them at all.
However, it does seem that arch-remainers are a bit too desperate for these issues to become serious - which is pretty unedifying in itself - while many arch-brexiteers are rather too quick to dismiss the issues out of hand.
As ever, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.
We're now seeing the derangement from those people who lost the argument ratchet up and reality denied as they go down swinging but they lost and they know it. Wages at the bottom are rising.
AA President Edmund King says there is no shortage of fuel and thousands of petrol stations are operating normally with just a few suffering temporary supply chain problems
*In a Working Men's Club. Not some posho wine bar. Keeping it real.
https://twitter.com/willsommer/status/1441233874340646919
I see also that Abbot has decided that Texas needs one too now (but only in the Dem districts)
In other news, googling that, Sweden is apparently going to remove its remaining Covid restrictions this month. Only two and a bit months after the UK...
(Yes, I know for long periods they had looser restrictions than us and never had anything matching our tightest restrictions)
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/09/britain-france-us-aukus/620186/
https://twitter.com/GeorgeAylett/status/1441100201813417990
Oh I did not know that sorry, I thought it was a joke.
I feel bad now.
(a) vote against the electoral college reforms to defeat and humiliate Starmer?
(b) vote for them, so that Wes Streeting can then defeat and humiliate Starmer?
(semi serious - voting for strengthens Starmer, outwardly, voting against weakens him)
More seriously, what's your position on Streeting?
Their approach would make Jo Maugham blush.
Given I was there related to an investment in equipment inspired by the massive tax incentive in the recent budget....
https://twitter.com/AmbColonna/status/1378024545865580545
Easier just to send then to a subsidy where they can do little harm....
https://twitter.com/bubbaprog/status/1441071490489856002
Measles is one of the biggest childhood killers.
Before the Falklands, an MI6 agent in Argentina warned that something was up. The FO response was to suppress his reports and try and get him fired, so that reports wouldn't reach ministers and upset the FO internal policy on the Falklands.
They were still trying to crush his career *after* Port Stanley was recaptured.
Had i still been a member i would not be voting for him under any foreseeable circumstance
The collapse of Avro’s consumer division on Wednesday was the biggest failure yet seen of a household supplier
Jake's father Andrew joined the business in 2017. The pair do not appear to have invested any of their own money in the company, which has been financed by the advance fees paid by customers. Each owns half the shares in Avro Group, the holding company for a string of businesses
https://twitter.com/thetimes/status/1441305343816990720?s=20
Sounds rather ponzi-scheme light....we have no money, no investment, we rely on new money coming in. No wonder they weren't hedging.
On another note: yesterday I reached 2,000 miles run this year. Obsessive, moi?
OTOH, measles infection wipes immune memory (which is why it's a killer), so if an outbreak is sufficiently widespread, we might even get a whole new Covid wave sometime in the future.
And yet we do all pay tax - VAT, but in the UK we hide that. The American system where the state tax etc is added on to the display price is one example.
Via @DailyMailUK
https://insideevs.com/news/534101/electric-cars-60mph-acceleration-20210919/
My suspicion is they went really light on regulating these businesses with funny names because the politicians wanted to see a really active market full of supposed choice. Of course we now see the whole thing was an illusion.
Last week:
This week:
I think it has become clear now, no money down, business model based upon taking payment upfront, no hedging, no obvious signs you a suitable for such a business, no problemo says the authorities.
I'm most familiar with the Owen Jones recipe and I like it. But today I read Mandy's take - as below - and I like this too. Are they are at odds and so me liking both shows my utter confusion? No. They are ying and yang. It's about fusing modernity and radicalism. I'd like to see both of them in Starmer's first cabinet.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/23/keir-starmer-labour-three-things-to-do?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/energy-companies-uk-bust-latest-b1925373.html
Owen Paterson
@OwenPaterson
1h
I'm proud to be a Spartan. Our determination to resist extraordinary pressure & consistently vote against bad deals has made British democracy much freer to make its own decisions.
Eg 1.9m UK citizens in NI have not fully left EU & much still to do in other areas such as fishing.
Now these are businesses where I punted (And got out ahead due to bonus clearing & err panicking early) based on pawnbroking & charges over properties.
Never mind the paintings not being sold for valuation at auction, in plenty of cases Savingstream didn't even have the physical painting; and the RICS valuations for Lendy were frankly fraudulent.
Yet the FCA seems determined to go after cryptocurrencies, specifically Binance. Now you may well lose your shirt in Crypto, but the currencies are all at least there in the various blockchains unlike all the above...
Cabinet are split on visas, with George Eustice and Steve Barclay pushing for.
I understand solution could involve something similar to Seasonal Workers Scheme to avert immediate pressure.
Not confirmed whether Priti Patel will attend, but strongest opposition expected from the home office.
Strong rhetoric from Grant Shapps and Kwasi Kwarteng on need to reduce reliance on cheap foreign labour.
Sources expect any scheme would need to be strictly time-limited.
https://twitter.com/tamcohen/status/1441362264271962118
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/9652603/millions-line-80-year-theresa-mays-energy-price-cap-effects/
Result:
Less broccoli choice
More expensive broccoli
Fewer broccoli jobs
More broccoli imports
Fewer broccoli exports
Now repeat across the entire economy.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10024705/Labour-bids-Tory-mantle-party-home-ownership.html
Coinbase on the other hand are much more cautious over what they list, I think its only 50-60, and they never seem less in the crosshairs of UK regulators.
Binance also offer a whole load of financial products as well, loans, staking, etc. And again, quite a bit of it is on the lot more riskier end of things. BlockFi offers a smaller range of finances products, that look a lot more legit and again isn't in trouble in the UK.
Key cabinet ministers meeting this afternoon to address driver shortages and visa scheme
Perhaps he discovered an undercover “woke” cell at HM Treasury or something.
If it was a 10% cap it would make a difference. Increasing the foreign non resident surcharge significantly is the better solution.
(although my two actually eat broccoli very happily - pretty much at the top of their veg preference list, maybe after sweetcorn - it's supposed to be something they hate, isn't it?)
been at war with Eastasiasaid that foreign truckers were bad..."(At which point those cheering the government for holding firm today, will praise them for being pragmatic and flexible. It is a bit like umpires call in the cricket, whatever their decision, they will see the govt as correct.)
Just for you "but Corbyn Trot Trot Trot"
Apparently it’s a fiction, apart from that one time it happened to him.
I rest my case, ladies and gentlemen.