Presumably PB Lockdownistas will be popping up shortly to defend "No Earlier Than".
Ye gods, I'm fuming about the Pride news – I don't attend and wouldn't do so. But it's not about me, it's about the cultural life of our country being protected – and revived.
An absolute disgrace that this has been allowed to happen. How many more before the No Earlier Than nutters get the message?
I'm not sure your anger is directed at the right place. Assuming there is no virus resurgence, things should be pretty much back to normal by late June, and Pride is on 7/8 August. The Pride organisers need to be sure that the event can go ahead now for planning purposes, and they need to know that there will be no social distancing rules, or guidance, in early August. Only the government can give this reassurance. Given the amount of money already spent on Covid, all the government has to do is tell the organisers that in the remote chance that the event has to be cancelled, they will recoup the costs incurred so far. No idea what those would be, but maybe 50-100K? It's a problem for sure, but not one provoked by pro-lockdowners.
I think we are arguing the same point from a different angle. It's the fault of government, I agree. If it could be underwritten, then no problem. It's the combination of the "No Earlier Than" messaging and the lack of underwriting that makes it a poisonous situation.
It all flows back to the dodgy scientific models predicting absolute 100% doom which allows the politicians to justify these slow measures. If those scientists had put in the actually real values of immunity build up (~75% of the population expected in June vs 41% in their model) and actually known efficacy figures (80% for a single dose and >99% for two doses vs 60% that they used) would the politicians have been able to justify this slow timetable and any residual measures they clearly want to keep or preventing large events from getting insurance easily.
This is why I'm so angry at the scientists who produce these garbage models. The politicians are going to be political, I expect that. The scientists acting as they have done to give the politicians the ammunition with wildly incorrect models is why we are where we are.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
Needless to say, this Tory Red Waller disagrees with you. I'm not old enough to remember the seventies (or be alive then) but am curious what about the winter of discontent and the seventies in general met your description.
New Labour spent money until they ran out of it, but they had no long term solutions. The Tories have delivered for parts of the country and its time they deliver for the North too.
Ha ha, I'd be gobsmacked if you agreed with me! And no doubt we would come at the winter of discontent and the 70s from ideological opposites to.
I don't personally remember this golden age, I'm roughly the same age as you I think, I'm 43. But when I was a nipper you could ring your doctor, the phone would be answered straightaway, and you would get an appointment the same day. The local park had tennis courts and a bowling green and a permanent keeper who maintained them. All that kind of stuff has gone. Long gone.
The point I am making is that many, many red wallers of my acquaintance, who I discuss all this with, want a return to that world that existed when they were young, in the 50s and 60s, to well-funded public services, including social care and unemployment benefits, park keepers, all that kind of thing, that require higher taxes on business and well off individuals. Social housing, but not the brutalist concrete monstrosities of the past. And the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years have manifestly failed to deliver any of that, in fact they have constantly chipped away at it.
The return of all that stuff is what they expect of Brexit.
I'm five years younger than you. I came of age politically in Blair's time and I've never been able to just call a GP and get the phone answered straight away, but now I can use an app to get an appointment and not need to call at all.
I think we all want similar things, we just disagree on how to get them. The economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years have improved many things - when you look at it objectively then we are better off by far than we were 40 years ago, even if people look with blinkered rose-tinted glasses at the past.
In 1977 people on average needed to spend 25% of their income on food.
Undoubtedly technology has improved things. That's why food's cheaper. Stuff generally is cheaper, thanks to globalisation and poor foreign people making stuff for us.
If I need the doc I too make an appointment with an app now, but it is generally for a fortnight's time away - if I need something urgently I need to ring the surgery, stay in a queue for God knows how long, and it's all a bit pot luck.
But those things haven't improved the services that many people value, that add an almost intangible quality to daily life, that I've outlined in my previous comments.
And people are saddled with debt now. In the past they had disposable income to buy stuff, or could save to buy stuff. Now it's credit and leases.
But I don't have the time or inclination to debate endlessly about economic approaches. I just wanted to say what many red waller Brexiteers want and expect. And it ain't Singapore-on-Thames.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
Needless to say, this Tory Red Waller disagrees with you. I'm not old enough to remember the seventies (or be alive then) but am curious what about the winter of discontent and the seventies in general met your description.
New Labour spent money until they ran out of it, but they had no long term solutions. The Tories have delivered for parts of the country and its time they deliver for the North too.
Ha ha, I'd be gobsmacked if you agreed with me! And no doubt we would come at the winter of discontent and the 70s from ideological opposites to.
I don't personally remember this golden age, I'm roughly the same age as you I think, I'm 43. But when I was a nipper you could ring your doctor, the phone would be answered straightaway, and you would get an appointment the same day. The local park had tennis courts and a bowling green and a permanent keeper who maintained them. All that kind of stuff has gone. Long gone.
The point I am making is that many, many red wallers of my acquaintance, who I discuss all this with, want a return to that world that existed when they were young, in the 50s and 60s, to well-funded public services, including social care and unemployment benefits, park keepers, all that kind of thing, that require higher taxes on business and well off individuals. Social housing, but not the brutalist concrete monstrosities of the past. And the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years have manifestly failed to deliver any of that, in fact they have constantly chipped away at it.
The return of all that stuff is what they expect of Brexit.
The point about park keepers and public tennis courts is one that has puzzled me ... that is, how come we could afford things like that in the 60s and 70s? Were they really halcyon days? I don't think it is to do with higher taxes back then (and by that I mean "take" not "rates") although I could be wrong there.
I think it's to do with what we (and by that I mean government) choose to spend money on - and I think New Labour has a lot to answer for here. Would you rather have park keepers and gardeners or would you prefer diversity officers and translation services for a million and one obscure languages? I know what I'd prefer, what I'd value as a taxpayer.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
I think too, life was pretty grim in the 1950's and 1960's if you had little money, and lived in a poor district. Housing was certainly worse, in general, than it is today.
Taxes were not, in general, higher then, than they are now, nor public spending as a share of national income. And, we spent a lot more, as a share of national income, on the armed forces than we do today. But, where there is a big difference was demography. The population was significantly younger. We spend much less on pensions and health care than we do today. That freed up money for other things.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
That's true, but just saying "tough luck" to those priced out of the market isn't an answer either.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
The mystery is - how come inflation has disappeared as in theory it shouldn't have done given the amount of printing within the economy..
It hasn't disappeared - because of more competitive world product markets it's just mutated from consumer price inflation to asset price inflation.
Which assets have seen surging inflation?
House price to earnings ratios were lower nationwise in 2020 than they were in 2007.
But higher now than 2013 and more than double 1995.
QE didn't start in 2013, in fact almost all of the pre-Covid QE that did occur did so before 2013, only a small amount happened in 2016.
Comparing 2013 (or 1995) with [start of] 2020 is not comparing like-for-like since its trough from after the recession being compared with peak before the recession. Comparing 2007/08 with 2019/20 is comparing like-for-like.
In any case, nationwide ratios don't tell you much because they include dumps in the north where supply isn't tight. But London house prices/earnings ratios have gone from 5.2x to 9x since 2009.
We've also seen a doubling in fine art prices, and an unbelievable spike in meaningless crap like Bitcoin.
"Merging DNA with quantum computing will be both amazing and lethal"
DNA for data storage was a hot topic of research at least 10 years ago. Haven't heard much about it recently, but I do recall proof of concept had been achieved.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
That analysis does not really work imo, and tbh is a little insulting imo ("conditioned" etc.)
The time jobs for life became less reliable, and inflation / unemployment started to have seriously higher levels, was from the oil shock in 1973 - which did happen at the time of EU accession, which may account for something.
But that requires Brexit voters to be 'by and large' more than 55 to remember it as a small child.
*Nationally* nearly half voted for Brexit in the age group 24-49 (54:46 for remain).
Which is a lot. Especially a lot of young people in Red Wall areas, when the Brexit percentage would be much higher.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
Needless to say, this Tory Red Waller disagrees with you. I'm not old enough to remember the seventies (or be alive then) but am curious what about the winter of discontent and the seventies in general met your description.
New Labour spent money until they ran out of it, but they had no long term solutions. The Tories have delivered for parts of the country and its time they deliver for the North too.
Ha ha, I'd be gobsmacked if you agreed with me! And no doubt we would come at the winter of discontent and the 70s from ideological opposites to.
I don't personally remember this golden age, I'm roughly the same age as you I think, I'm 43. But when I was a nipper you could ring your doctor, the phone would be answered straightaway, and you would get an appointment the same day. The local park had tennis courts and a bowling green and a permanent keeper who maintained them. All that kind of stuff has gone. Long gone.
The point I am making is that many, many red wallers of my acquaintance, who I discuss all this with, want a return to that world that existed when they were young, in the 50s and 60s, to well-funded public services, including social care and unemployment benefits, park keepers, all that kind of thing, that require higher taxes on business and well off individuals. Social housing, but not the brutalist concrete monstrosities of the past. And the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years have manifestly failed to deliver any of that, in fact they have constantly chipped away at it.
The return of all that stuff is what they expect of Brexit.
The point about park keepers and public tennis courts is one that has puzzled me ... that is, how come we could afford things like that in the 60s and 70s? Were they really halcyon days? I don't think it is to do with higher taxes back then (and by that I mean "take" not "rates") although I could be wrong there.
I think it's to do with what we (and by that I mean government) choose to spend money on - and I think New Labour has a lot to answer for here. Would you rather have park keepers and gardeners or would you prefer diversity officers and translation services for a million and one obscure languages? I know what I'd prefer, what I'd value as a taxpayer.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
Labour is too expensive now. That's the plain truth of it, especially in the public sector.
True, especially when you factor in public sector pension costs, but that doesn't stop you hiring a park keeper rather than a diversity officer. In fact, I'd bet you could hire two park keepers for the price of one office non-job and get a lot more value for money.
NEW: Poll of 1,500 Scots for @STVNews has SNP on course for a majority in tomorrow’s election, winning 50% of constituency vote to give the follow seat projection.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
Needless to say, this Tory Red Waller disagrees with you. I'm not old enough to remember the seventies (or be alive then) but am curious what about the winter of discontent and the seventies in general met your description.
New Labour spent money until they ran out of it, but they had no long term solutions. The Tories have delivered for parts of the country and its time they deliver for the North too.
Ha ha, I'd be gobsmacked if you agreed with me! And no doubt we would come at the winter of discontent and the 70s from ideological opposites to.
I don't personally remember this golden age, I'm roughly the same age as you I think, I'm 43. But when I was a nipper you could ring your doctor, the phone would be answered straightaway, and you would get an appointment the same day. The local park had tennis courts and a bowling green and a permanent keeper who maintained them. All that kind of stuff has gone. Long gone.
The point I am making is that many, many red wallers of my acquaintance, who I discuss all this with, want a return to that world that existed when they were young, in the 50s and 60s, to well-funded public services, including social care and unemployment benefits, park keepers, all that kind of thing, that require higher taxes on business and well off individuals. Social housing, but not the brutalist concrete monstrosities of the past. And the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years have manifestly failed to deliver any of that, in fact they have constantly chipped away at it.
The return of all that stuff is what they expect of Brexit.
The point about park keepers and public tennis courts is one that has puzzled me ... that is, how come we could afford things like that in the 60s and 70s? Were they really halcyon days? I don't think it is to do with higher taxes back then (and by that I mean "take" not "rates") although I could be wrong there.
I think it's to do with what we (and by that I mean government) choose to spend money on - and I think New Labour has a lot to answer for here. Would you rather have park keepers and gardeners or would you prefer diversity officers and translation services for a million and one obscure languages? I know what I'd prefer, what I'd value as a taxpayer.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
Labour is too expensive now. That's the plain truth of it, especially in the public sector.
True, especially when you factor in public sector pension costs, but that doesn't stop you hiring a park keeper rather than a diversity officer. In fact, I'd bet you could hire two park keepers for the price of one office non-job and get a lot more value for money.
Why doesn't the public sector just offer employees defined contribution pensions like everyone else?
NEW: Poll of 1,500 Scots for @STVNews has SNP on course for a majority in tomorrow’s election, winning 50% of constituency vote to give the follow seat projection.
The problem with these polls is that the majority may have voted by post two weeks ago when the polls were saying something very different. I think I'll wait until Friday morning.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
That strikes me as a very Little England view, and I agree that is why Labour are struggling.
Little Englanders are in the ascendancy and the Tories are their party, for now.
NEW: Poll of 1,500 Scots for @STVNews has SNP on course for a majority in tomorrow’s election, winning 50% of constituency vote to give the follow seat projection.
NEW: Poll of 1,500 Scots for @STVNews has SNP on course for a majority in tomorrow’s election, winning 50% of constituency vote to give the follow seat projection.
The problem with these polls is that the majority may have voted by post two weeks ago when the polls were saying something very different. I think I'll wait until Friday morning.
At least we’ve a wide range of potential outcomes here..
"Merging DNA with quantum computing will be both amazing and lethal"
DNA for data storage was a hot topic of research at least 10 years ago. Haven't heard much about it recently, but I do recall proof of concept had been achieved.
Pre-COVID, I'd meet both Tom Knight and Drew Endy at the annual iGEM Jamboree. Tom is retired now but he is/was treated something like a god by the kids involved in the competition.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
Needless to say, this Tory Red Waller disagrees with you. I'm not old enough to remember the seventies (or be alive then) but am curious what about the winter of discontent and the seventies in general met your description.
New Labour spent money until they ran out of it, but they had no long term solutions. The Tories have delivered for parts of the country and its time they deliver for the North too.
Ha ha, I'd be gobsmacked if you agreed with me! And no doubt we would come at the winter of discontent and the 70s from ideological opposites to.
I don't personally remember this golden age, I'm roughly the same age as you I think, I'm 43. But when I was a nipper you could ring your doctor, the phone would be answered straightaway, and you would get an appointment the same day. The local park had tennis courts and a bowling green and a permanent keeper who maintained them. All that kind of stuff has gone. Long gone.
The point I am making is that many, many red wallers of my acquaintance, who I discuss all this with, want a return to that world that existed when they were young, in the 50s and 60s, to well-funded public services, including social care and unemployment benefits, park keepers, all that kind of thing, that require higher taxes on business and well off individuals. Social housing, but not the brutalist concrete monstrosities of the past. And the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years have manifestly failed to deliver any of that, in fact they have constantly chipped away at it.
The return of all that stuff is what they expect of Brexit.
The point about park keepers and public tennis courts is one that has puzzled me ... that is, how come we could afford things like that in the 60s and 70s? Were they really halcyon days? I don't think it is to do with higher taxes back then (and by that I mean "take" not "rates") although I could be wrong there.
I think it's to do with what we (and by that I mean government) choose to spend money on - and I think New Labour has a lot to answer for here. Would you rather have park keepers and gardeners or would you prefer diversity officers and translation services for a million and one obscure languages? I know what I'd prefer, what I'd value as a taxpayer.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
Labour is too expensive now. That's the plain truth of it, especially in the public sector.
True, especially when you factor in public sector pension costs, but that doesn't stop you hiring a park keeper rather than a diversity officer. In fact, I'd bet you could hire two park keepers for the price of one office non-job and get a lot more value for money.
Why doesn't the public sector just offer employees defined contribution pensions like everyone else?
I've had this argument previously - and the reply back was that it is too expensive* ! Defined Cont being too expensive compared to DB is true only if you believe David Copperfield really can make the Eiffel Tower disappear. *Accounting technicalities
With just 2% of the regional vote, former first minister Alex Salmond’s new party Alba would probably fail to win a seat should the poll be replicated at the ballot boxes on Thursday.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
That's true, but just saying "tough luck" to those priced out of the market isn't an answer either.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
The mystery is - how come inflation has disappeared as in theory it shouldn't have done given the amount of printing within the economy..
It hasn't disappeared - because of more competitive world product markets it's just mutated from consumer price inflation to asset price inflation.
Which assets have seen surging inflation?
House price to earnings ratios were lower nationwise in 2020 than they were in 2007.
But higher now than 2013 and more than double 1995.
QE didn't start in 2013, in fact almost all of the pre-Covid QE that did occur did so before 2013, only a small amount happened in 2016.
Comparing 2013 (or 1995) with [start of] 2020 is not comparing like-for-like since its trough from after the recession being compared with peak before the recession. Comparing 2007/08 with 2019/20 is comparing like-for-like.
In any case, nationwide ratios don't tell you much because they include dumps in the north where supply isn't tight. But London house prices/earnings ratios have gone from 5.2x to 9x since 2009.
We've also seen a doubling in fine art prices, and an unbelievable spike in meaningless crap like Bitcoin.
Again 2009 is a trough during the financial crisis, compare like-for-like, peak-to-peak.
I'm not really keen on you calling where I live a "dump" but if it was just inflation that was an issue then that should have seen inflation up here too. That houses have surged in London possibly has more to do with issues in London and less to do with finance.
London's population has increased 17.5% from 2007 to 2019. Has construction kept place to ensure that total housing available has also gone up by 17.5% in the same time?
Or are there instead more people expected to live without housing supply increasing at the same rate as demand?
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
Needless to say, this Tory Red Waller disagrees with you. I'm not old enough to remember the seventies (or be alive then) but am curious what about the winter of discontent and the seventies in general met your description.
New Labour spent money until they ran out of it, but they had no long term solutions. The Tories have delivered for parts of the country and its time they deliver for the North too.
Ha ha, I'd be gobsmacked if you agreed with me! And no doubt we would come at the winter of discontent and the 70s from ideological opposites to.
I don't personally remember this golden age, I'm roughly the same age as you I think, I'm 43. But when I was a nipper you could ring your doctor, the phone would be answered straightaway, and you would get an appointment the same day. The local park had tennis courts and a bowling green and a permanent keeper who maintained them. All that kind of stuff has gone. Long gone.
The point I am making is that many, many red wallers of my acquaintance, who I discuss all this with, want a return to that world that existed when they were young, in the 50s and 60s, to well-funded public services, including social care and unemployment benefits, park keepers, all that kind of thing, that require higher taxes on business and well off individuals. Social housing, but not the brutalist concrete monstrosities of the past. And the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years have manifestly failed to deliver any of that, in fact they have constantly chipped away at it.
The return of all that stuff is what they expect of Brexit.
The point about park keepers and public tennis courts is one that has puzzled me ... that is, how come we could afford things like that in the 60s and 70s? Were they really halcyon days? I don't think it is to do with higher taxes back then (and by that I mean "take" not "rates") although I could be wrong there.
I think it's to do with what we (and by that I mean government) choose to spend money on - and I think New Labour has a lot to answer for here. Would you rather have park keepers and gardeners or would you prefer diversity officers and translation services for a million and one obscure languages? I know what I'd prefer, what I'd value as a taxpayer.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
I think too, life was pretty grim in the 1950's and 1960's if you had little money, and lived in a poor district. Housing was certainly worse, in general, than it is today.
Taxes were not, in general, higher then, than they are now, nor public spending as a share of national income. And, we spent a lot more, as a share of national income, on the armed forces than we do today. But, where there is a big difference was demography. The population was significantly younger. We spend much less on pensions and health care than we do today. That freed up money for other things.
My main memory of the 70s is a gentle seediness and decay. All the modern buildings in my little English town were crap. All the grand ones were Victorian or Edwardian (or earlier). This set the tone
I went back to my hometown for the first time in decades, a couple of years ago. What astonished me was the sense of new prosperity, the chic coffee bars and gleaming gastropubs, little art galleries which used to be chippies
So I'm really not sure it was all better back then
However I do agree - and have said before - that a party that promised to Get The Little Things Right - potholes, old phone boxes (get rid), roaring motorbikes (ditto), graffiti, littering, fly tipping - would prosper. Make our towns and cities prettier
We know you can't eradicate poverty, but cleaning the pavement would be a decent start
A feature of *some* Red Wall seats is that they are places where people on average incomes can live quite well. Whereas, in a lot of London constituencies, people on above-average incomes can't live well.
A couple earning £40,000 a year between them can afford a decent house in a seat like Bishop Auckland or Sedgefield. A couple earning £60,000 a year between them in a lot of London can't.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
That analysis does not really work imo, and tbh is a little insulting imo ("conditioned" etc.)
The time jobs for life became less reliable, and inflation / unemployment started to have seriously higher levels, was from the oil shock in 1973 - which did happen at the time of EU accession, which may account for something.
But that requires Brexit voters to be 'by and large' more than 55 to remember it as a small child.
*Nationally* nearly half voted for Brexit in the age group 24-49 (54:46 for remain).
Which is a lot. Especially a lot of young people in Red Wall areas, when the Brexit percentage would be much higher.
Maybe I'm being insulting, maybe condescending. I don't mean to be, I'm just telling it as I see it, all around me, in my daily (well, pre-Covid) life, and have done all my life. These people don't care about politics, they're not particularly educated (which, I must emphasise, doesn't mean they're stupid or thick, though some inevitably are), they absorb simple messages that are drilled into them over many years. Foreigners take your jobs. Foreigners clog up your hospitals. Etc. etc, etc.
Yep, a lot of younger people have assimilated the views of their parents, sadly.
NEW: Poll of 1,500 Scots for @STVNews has SNP on course for a majority in tomorrow’s election, winning 50% of constituency vote to give the follow seat projection.
NEW: Poll of 1,500 Scots for @STVNews has SNP on course for a majority in tomorrow’s election, winning 50% of constituency vote to give the follow seat projection.
The problem with these polls is that the majority may have voted by post two weeks ago when the polls were saying something very different. I think I'll wait until Friday morning.
At least we’ve a wide range of potential outcomes here..
Looking forward to post independence adverts. For just £5 a month you can give a Scotsman a daily bowl of porridge and a slice of humble pie..
NEW: Poll of 1,500 Scots for @STVNews has SNP on course for a majority in tomorrow’s election, winning 50% of constituency vote to give the follow seat projection.
NEW: Poll of 1,500 Scots for @STVNews has SNP on course for a majority in tomorrow’s election, winning 50% of constituency vote to give the follow seat projection.
NEW: Poll of 1,500 Scots for @STVNews has SNP on course for a majority in tomorrow’s election, winning 50% of constituency vote to give the follow seat projection.
With latest final polls out, groups of pollsters: Grp 1: SNP short of majority & fewer MSPs, pro indy majority, Tories 2nd - ComRes Grp 2: SNP majority likely, Tories 2nd - YG, Opinium, Mori, Survation, BMG Grp 3: SNP majority 50/50, Alba MSPs possible, Tories 2nd - P'base #sp21 https://twitter.com/markdiffley1/status/1389905302590529543
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
Needless to say, this Tory Red Waller disagrees with you. I'm not old enough to remember the seventies (or be alive then) but am curious what about the winter of discontent and the seventies in general met your description.
New Labour spent money until they ran out of it, but they had no long term solutions. The Tories have delivered for parts of the country and its time they deliver for the North too.
Ha ha, I'd be gobsmacked if you agreed with me! And no doubt we would come at the winter of discontent and the 70s from ideological opposites to.
I don't personally remember this golden age, I'm roughly the same age as you I think, I'm 43. But when I was a nipper you could ring your doctor, the phone would be answered straightaway, and you would get an appointment the same day. The local park had tennis courts and a bowling green and a permanent keeper who maintained them. All that kind of stuff has gone. Long gone.
The point I am making is that many, many red wallers of my acquaintance, who I discuss all this with, want a return to that world that existed when they were young, in the 50s and 60s, to well-funded public services, including social care and unemployment benefits, park keepers, all that kind of thing, that require higher taxes on business and well off individuals. Social housing, but not the brutalist concrete monstrosities of the past. And the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years have manifestly failed to deliver any of that, in fact they have constantly chipped away at it.
The return of all that stuff is what they expect of Brexit.
The point about park keepers and public tennis courts is one that has puzzled me ... that is, how come we could afford things like that in the 60s and 70s? Were they really halcyon days? I don't think it is to do with higher taxes back then (and by that I mean "take" not "rates") although I could be wrong there.
I think it's to do with what we (and by that I mean government) choose to spend money on - and I think New Labour has a lot to answer for here. Would you rather have park keepers and gardeners or would you prefer diversity officers and translation services for a million and one obscure languages? I know what I'd prefer, what I'd value as a taxpayer.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
I think too, life was pretty grim in the 1950's and 1960's if you had little money, and lived in a poor district. Housing was certainly worse, in general, than it is today.
Taxes were not, in general, higher then, than they are now, nor public spending as a share of national income. And, we spent a lot more, as a share of national income, on the armed forces than we do today. But, where there is a big difference was demography. The population was significantly younger. We spend much less on pensions and health care than we do today. That freed up money for other things.
I'm the same sort of age as you - 46 - and my memory of the seventies is that it was scruffy, dusty, unfinished, and covered in litter and graffiti. There is too much public squalor today and I would happily introduce the death penalty for graffiti, but I think the level of public squalor has declined since I was very small. Park keepers are an odd one - it's hard to believe they ever really existed outside the pages of Saturday morning comics. But are parks nowadays any less well-kept than in the 70s? My memory may be playing tricks on me but I don't think so. Social housing today is much, much better than that delivered at any point in the last 60 years. I've never had a problem ringing the doctor and getting an appointment the same day. In fact, again, GPs provide a far better level of customer service nowadays than I can remember at any time in the past. (Doctors are also much friendlier than the aloof and supercilious one I remember from my youth, though I may just have been unlucky back then!) What else is better today? Schools, public transport*, waste disposal, roads - the list goes on. There are few things you can convincingly make a case that the state does that it did better at any point in my 46 years on the planet. In short, I'd like the country to have better public services - but in my limited experience the state provides a better lot for its citizens than pretty much at any time in the past.
*granted I was born at something of a nadir for public transport - I think PT probably was better before mass car ownership.
NEW: Poll of 1,500 Scots for @STVNews has SNP on course for a majority in tomorrow’s election, winning 50% of constituency vote to give the follow seat projection.
The problem with these polls is that the majority may have voted by post two weeks ago when the polls were saying something very different. I think I'll wait until Friday morning.
A majority wouldn't have voted by post. The polls were saying more or less the same thing 2 weeks ago, the ComRes is very much the outlier. In fact the SNP constituency vote hasn't polled at 42% since last Oct. As I said, heroes or zeros come Saturday.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
That's true, but just saying "tough luck" to those priced out of the market isn't an answer either.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
The mystery is - how come inflation has disappeared as in theory it shouldn't have done given the amount of printing within the economy..
It hasn't disappeared - because of more competitive world product markets it's just mutated from consumer price inflation to asset price inflation.
Which assets have seen surging inflation?
House price to earnings ratios were lower nationwise in 2020 than they were in 2007.
But higher now than 2013 and more than double 1995.
QE didn't start in 2013, in fact almost all of the pre-Covid QE that did occur did so before 2013, only a small amount happened in 2016.
Comparing 2013 (or 1995) with [start of] 2020 is not comparing like-for-like since its trough from after the recession being compared with peak before the recession. Comparing 2007/08 with 2019/20 is comparing like-for-like.
In any case, nationwide ratios don't tell you much because they include dumps in the north where supply isn't tight. But London house prices/earnings ratios have gone from 5.2x to 9x since 2009.
We've also seen a doubling in fine art prices, and an unbelievable spike in meaningless crap like Bitcoin.
Again 2009 is a trough during the financial crisis, compare like-for-like, peak-to-peak.
I'm not really keen on you calling where I live a "dump" but if it was just inflation that was an issue then that should have seen inflation up here too. That houses have surged in London possibly has more to do with issues in London and less to do with finance.
London's population has increased 17.5% from 2007 to 2019. Has construction kept place to ensure that total housing available has also gone up by 17.5% in the same time?
Or are there instead more people expected to live without housing supply increasing at the same rate as demand?
I've no idea whether where you live is a dump or not.
I'm sure both are factors. House prices are complicated, since houses are also goods as well as assets. Much better to consider purer financial assets like bonds, Bitcoin or fine art.
NEW: Poll of 1,500 Scots for @STVNews has SNP on course for a majority in tomorrow’s election, winning 50% of constituency vote to give the follow seat projection.
NEW: Poll of 1,500 Scots for @STVNews has SNP on course for a majority in tomorrow’s election, winning 50% of constituency vote to give the follow seat projection.
Sturgeon's policy is for Scotland to use the currency of a foreign country, not have its own currency. So all its borrowing would be in a foreign currency. There are plenty of examples of countries being unable to borrow in foreign currencies to finance large fiscal deficits.
The early to mid 70s were indeed very different from the late '70s. A strong sense of decay was setting in in the late 70s, and contrary to a lot of received wisdom, in many areas that sense of decay has never left, but in some ways even deepened during the 1980s.
NEW: Poll of 1,500 Scots for @STVNews has SNP on course for a majority in tomorrow’s election, winning 50% of constituency vote to give the follow seat projection.
With latest final polls out, groups of pollsters: Grp 1: SNP short of majority & fewer MSPs, pro indy majority, Tories 2nd - ComRes Grp 2: SNP majority likely, Tories 2nd - YG, Opinium, Mori, Survation, BMG Grp 3: SNP majority 50/50, Alba MSPs possible, Tories 2nd - P'base #sp21
NEW: Poll of 1,500 Scots for @STVNews has SNP on course for a majority in tomorrow’s election, winning 50% of constituency vote to give the follow seat projection.
Sturgeon's policy is for Scotland to use the currency of a foreign country, not have its own currency. So all its borrowing would be in a foreign currency. There are plenty of examples of countries being unable to borrow in foreign currencies to finance large fiscal deficits.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
That's true, but just saying "tough luck" to those priced out of the market isn't an answer either.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
The mystery is - how come inflation has disappeared as in theory it shouldn't have done given the amount of printing within the economy..
An early economics lesson used to be an increase in M3 always used to be inflationary.
Sturgeon's policy is for Scotland to use the currency of a foreign country, not have its own currency. So all its borrowing would be in a foreign currency. There are plenty of examples of countries being unable to borrow in foreign currencies to finance large fiscal deficits.
Worth reading the thread for the level of stupidity we can expect.
Scotland demanding a share of the Bank of England without understanding that that wouldn't help them at all as with 90% of the economy and 90% of the vote any Scottish desires would be ignored. In the way that the ECB did nothing to stop asset inflation in Ireland due to low interest rates prior to 2008.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
That strikes me as a very Little England view, and I agree that is why Labour are struggling.
Little Englanders are in the ascendancy and the Tories are their party, for now.
Call it a Little England view if you like but it's becoming a Bigger England view as the woke BS increases. I'm not sure how Labour copes with that. Does it even want to?
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
That's true, but just saying "tough luck" to those priced out of the market isn't an answer either.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
The mystery is - how come inflation has disappeared as in theory it shouldn't have done given the amount of printing within the economy..
It hasn't disappeared - because of more competitive world product markets it's just mutated from consumer price inflation to asset price inflation.
Which assets have seen surging inflation?
House price to earnings ratios were lower nationwise in 2020 than they were in 2007.
But higher now than 2013 and more than double 1995.
QE didn't start in 2013, in fact almost all of the pre-Covid QE that did occur did so before 2013, only a small amount happened in 2016.
Comparing 2013 (or 1995) with [start of] 2020 is not comparing like-for-like since its trough from after the recession being compared with peak before the recession. Comparing 2007/08 with 2019/20 is comparing like-for-like.
In any case, nationwide ratios don't tell you much because they include dumps in the north where supply isn't tight. But London house prices/earnings ratios have gone from 5.2x to 9x since 2009.
We've also seen a doubling in fine art prices, and an unbelievable spike in meaningless crap like Bitcoin.
Again 2009 is a trough during the financial crisis, compare like-for-like, peak-to-peak.
I'm not really keen on you calling where I live a "dump" but if it was just inflation that was an issue then that should have seen inflation up here too. That houses have surged in London possibly has more to do with issues in London and less to do with finance.
London's population has increased 17.5% from 2007 to 2019. Has construction kept place to ensure that total housing available has also gone up by 17.5% in the same time?
Or are there instead more people expected to live without housing supply increasing at the same rate as demand?
I've no idea whether where you live is a dump or not.
I'm sure both are factors. House prices are complicated, since houses are also goods as well as assets. Much better to consider purer financial assets like bonds, Bitcoin or fine art.
Bitcoin's a pyramid scheme not a pure financial asset. 😂
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
Needless to say, this Tory Red Waller disagrees with you. I'm not old enough to remember the seventies (or be alive then) but am curious what about the winter of discontent and the seventies in general met your description.
New Labour spent money until they ran out of it, but they had no long term solutions. The Tories have delivered for parts of the country and its time they deliver for the North too.
Ha ha, I'd be gobsmacked if you agreed with me! And no doubt we would come at the winter of discontent and the 70s from ideological opposites to.
I don't personally remember this golden age, I'm roughly the same age as you I think, I'm 43. But when I was a nipper you could ring your doctor, the phone would be answered straightaway, and you would get an appointment the same day. The local park had tennis courts and a bowling green and a permanent keeper who maintained them. All that kind of stuff has gone. Long gone.
The point I am making is that many, many red wallers of my acquaintance, who I discuss all this with, want a return to that world that existed when they were young, in the 50s and 60s, to well-funded public services, including social care and unemployment benefits, park keepers, all that kind of thing, that require higher taxes on business and well off individuals. Social housing, but not the brutalist concrete monstrosities of the past. And the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years have manifestly failed to deliver any of that, in fact they have constantly chipped away at it.
The return of all that stuff is what they expect of Brexit.
The point about park keepers and public tennis courts is one that has puzzled me ... that is, how come we could afford things like that in the 60s and 70s? Were they really halcyon days? I don't think it is to do with higher taxes back then (and by that I mean "take" not "rates") although I could be wrong there.
I think it's to do with what we (and by that I mean government) choose to spend money on - and I think New Labour has a lot to answer for here. Would you rather have park keepers and gardeners or would you prefer diversity officers and translation services for a million and one obscure languages? I know what I'd prefer, what I'd value as a taxpayer.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
I think too, life was pretty grim in the 1950's and 1960's if you had little money, and lived in a poor district. Housing was certainly worse, in general, than it is today.
Taxes were not, in general, higher then, than they are now, nor public spending as a share of national income. And, we spent a lot more, as a share of national income, on the armed forces than we do today. But, where there is a big difference was demography. The population was significantly younger. We spend much less on pensions and health care than we do today. That freed up money for other things.
I'm the same sort of age as you - 46 - and my memory of the seventies is that it was scruffy, dusty, unfinished, and covered in litter and graffiti. There is too much public squalor today and I would happily introduce the death penalty for graffiti, but I think the level of public squalor has declined since I was very small. Park keepers are an odd one - it's hard to believe they ever really existed outside the pages of Saturday morning comics. But are parks nowadays any less well-kept than in the 70s? My memory may be playing tricks on me but I don't think so. Social housing today is much, much better than that delivered at any point in the last 60 years. I've never had a problem ringing the doctor and getting an appointment the same day. In fact, again, GPs provide a far better level of customer service nowadays than I can remember at any time in the past. (Doctors are also much friendlier than the aloof and supercilious one I remember from my youth, though I may just have been unlucky back then!) What else is better today? Schools, public transport*, waste disposal, roads - the list goes on. There are few things you can convincingly make a case that the state does that it did better at any point in my 46 years on the planet. In short, I'd like the country to have better public services - but in my limited experience the state provides a better lot for its citizens than pretty much at any time in the past.
*granted I was born at something of a nadir for public transport - I think PT probably was better before mass car ownership.
Growing up in the 1970's in North London, I'd say public transport was far worse than it is today (but the experience outside London may be entirely different). Hospitals and schools were certainly shabbier, although that is not say the quality of either medical care or teaching was worse.
As against that, there were more well-paid jobs for people (especially men) who did not have much in the way of qualifications. And, for the average professional person, earning a decent living was much easier in the 1970's than it is today - there was nothing like the tangle of expensive regulation you have to deal with now. And, as a child, you were left pretty much to your own devices in a way that is unthinkable today. We had park keepers, but also, a lot more vandalism than today.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
That's true, but just saying "tough luck" to those priced out of the market isn't an answer either.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
The mystery is - how come inflation has disappeared as in theory it shouldn't have done given the amount of printing within the economy..
An early economics lesson used to be an increase in M3 always used to be inflationary.
Johnson seems to defy gravity.
It's not Johnson - that's been the case for a long time now.
Modern Monetary Theory is both a joke and the recognition of reality - reality is suspended until at some point it just isn't. Sadly by that point it's too late.
The early to mid 70s were indeed very different from the late '70s. A strong sense of decay was setting in in the late 70s, and contrary to a lot of received wisdom, in many areas that sense of decay has never left, but in some ways even deepened during the 1980s.
The shenanigans of OPEC. Industrialised world economies were designed for cheap oil. Add in the US retreating from fiscal discipline due to the Vietnam War and the end of monetary coordination and everything was thrown into turmoil.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
That strikes me as a very Little England view, and I agree that is why Labour are struggling.
Little Englanders are in the ascendancy and the Tories are their party, for now.
Call it a Little England view if you like but it's becoming a Bigger England view as the woke BS increases. I'm not sure how Labour copes with that. Does it even want to?
You're relying on the young becoming less "woke" as they grow older. They probably will not. The Overton window will simply shift, as it has done over the past 100 years. Believing in gay marriage used to be woke af.
Sturgeon's policy is for Scotland to use the currency of a foreign country, not have its own currency. So all its borrowing would be in a foreign currency. There are plenty of examples of countries being unable to borrow in foreign currencies to finance large fiscal deficits.
Worth reading the thread for the level of stupidity we can expect.
Scotland demanding a share of the Bank of England without understanding that that wouldn't help them at all as with 90% of the economy and 90% of the vote any Scottish desires would be ignored. In the way that the ECB did nothing to stop asset inflation in Ireland due to low interest rates prior to 2008.
The worrying thing is - A large chunk of Scots believe this. Presumably helped by the SNPs failure in education over the last 14 years
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
Needless to say, this Tory Red Waller disagrees with you. I'm not old enough to remember the seventies (or be alive then) but am curious what about the winter of discontent and the seventies in general met your description.
New Labour spent money until they ran out of it, but they had no long term solutions. The Tories have delivered for parts of the country and its time they deliver for the North too.
Ha ha, I'd be gobsmacked if you agreed with me! And no doubt we would come at the winter of discontent and the 70s from ideological opposites to.
I don't personally remember this golden age, I'm roughly the same age as you I think, I'm 43. But when I was a nipper you could ring your doctor, the phone would be answered straightaway, and you would get an appointment the same day. The local park had tennis courts and a bowling green and a permanent keeper who maintained them. All that kind of stuff has gone. Long gone.
The point I am making is that many, many red wallers of my acquaintance, who I discuss all this with, want a return to that world that existed when they were young, in the 50s and 60s, to well-funded public services, including social care and unemployment benefits, park keepers, all that kind of thing, that require higher taxes on business and well off individuals. Social housing, but not the brutalist concrete monstrosities of the past. And the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years have manifestly failed to deliver any of that, in fact they have constantly chipped away at it.
The return of all that stuff is what they expect of Brexit.
The point about park keepers and public tennis courts is one that has puzzled me ... that is, how come we could afford things like that in the 60s and 70s? Were they really halcyon days? I don't think it is to do with higher taxes back then (and by that I mean "take" not "rates") although I could be wrong there.
I think it's to do with what we (and by that I mean government) choose to spend money on - and I think New Labour has a lot to answer for here. Would you rather have park keepers and gardeners or would you prefer diversity officers and translation services for a million and one obscure languages? I know what I'd prefer, what I'd value as a taxpayer.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
I think too, life was pretty grim in the 1950's and 1960's if you had little money, and lived in a poor district. Housing was certainly worse, in general, than it is today.
Taxes were not, in general, higher then, than they are now, nor public spending as a share of national income. And, we spent a lot more, as a share of national income, on the armed forces than we do today. But, where there is a big difference was demography. The population was significantly younger. We spend much less on pensions and health care than we do today. That freed up money for other things.
I'm the same sort of age as you - 46 - and my memory of the seventies is that it was scruffy, dusty, unfinished, and covered in litter and graffiti. There is too much public squalor today and I would happily introduce the death penalty for graffiti, but I think the level of public squalor has declined since I was very small. Park keepers are an odd one - it's hard to believe they ever really existed outside the pages of Saturday morning comics. But are parks nowadays any less well-kept than in the 70s? My memory may be playing tricks on me but I don't think so. Social housing today is much, much better than that delivered at any point in the last 60 years. I've never had a problem ringing the doctor and getting an appointment the same day. In fact, again, GPs provide a far better level of customer service nowadays than I can remember at any time in the past. (Doctors are also much friendlier than the aloof and supercilious one I remember from my youth, though I may just have been unlucky back then!) What else is better today? Schools, public transport*, waste disposal, roads - the list goes on. There are few things you can convincingly make a case that the state does that it did better at any point in my 46 years on the planet. In short, I'd like the country to have better public services - but in my limited experience the state provides a better lot for its citizens than pretty much at any time in the past.
*granted I was born at something of a nadir for public transport - I think PT probably was better before mass car ownership.
I feel much safer now than I did in the 70s. As a young man I was very conscious of the thugs that were out and about. Maybe it is better because I am now much older, or may be it is just a lot safer.
On the subject of tax and benefits, or wages, being the cause of the poverty trap - when I was at university the Unions were pushing to have the Minimum Wage reach £5 per hour. Its now more than doubled in that time, when inflation has not more than doubled prices in the same period. £4.20 that the minimum wage was in 2002 is worth £6.99 in 2020 according to the Bank of England calculator. £5 that the Unions were campaigning for in 2002 is worth £8.31 in 2020 money, less than the minimum wage of £8.72
The problem is not the minimum wage the problem is that people earning the minimum wage face a real tax rate of upto 90%. It doesn't matter if you increase the minimum wage to £9, £10, £15 or £20 - so long as you keep taxing people 90% of what they earn, they won't see the benefits of that increase.
Means-tested benefits may sound generous, "lets give money to those that need it", but they are economically evil. They trap people in poverty.
The solution is simple but unpopular on both the left and the right. Abolish all means-tested benefits. Replace these with a Universal Basic Income. Then tax people with a clean, simple tax rate on whatever they earn. No new means-tested benefits to "aid" the poor that just then ensure they are either trapped in poverty, or £1 above the poverty line wherever you've drawn it.
If any party pledged this, even the Labour Party, I would vote for them.
I’ve seen numbers that just about work in the U.K. if you were to pay UBI to children at about 80%, and scrap the personal allowance and the 20% income tax rate, leaving everyone to pay 40% on all income including capital gains and investment income.
The problem is the massive number of edge cases who end up significantly worse off (in areas of expensive rent currently paid with housing benefit) and increased incentive to have a large number of children instead of working.
Yep - the problem with all the solutions is - you can't do that from this starting point..
Philip has a point that the effective taper rate is 90% and so too high but how on earth do you reduce it.
Especially if the only way those people are providing services in the South East is thanks to their subsidised housing.
You build more houses in the SE and fix that first.
Good luck with that one - that way lies poverty for any home owner in the south (says a person with a house that hasn't increased in value since 2005 as housing has kept up with demand as demonstrated by the 5000 houses that now exist between my home and the motorway).
"Poverty" is struggling to pay your rent, struggling to put a roof over your head, struggling to pay for your food, your heating, your energy.
Not seeing the home you own go down in value.
You were pretty young in the 1990s, weren't you?
Mass negative equity is utterly toxic. People struggle to move, if they can move house at all. So they can't move where the jobs are, they can't separate if their relationship breaks down. And it's younger people who get stuffed the most, because they bought at the highest prices and have had the least time to repay any of the principal.
The absurd house prices in the South are a massive problem, and really the answer is that things should never have got this way. And both Thatcher and Blair (the two great electoral successes of my lifetime) let house prices rip on their watches... unfortunately, I think there's a connection there.
But just saying "tough luck" to those who lose out from falling house prices isn't an answer either.
That's true, but just saying "tough luck" to those priced out of the market isn't an answer either.
One problem is we've become too good at abolishing inflation. We need some, moderate, inflation. That then massively reduces the risk of negative inflation and if house price rises can be kept to below the rate of general inflation and wage inflation then we can see real price/earnings ratios come down without negative equity.
Such a balance is very difficult to strike though.
The mystery is - how come inflation has disappeared as in theory it shouldn't have done given the amount of printing within the economy..
An early economics lesson used to be an increase in M3 always used to be inflationary.
The Ipsos Mori fieldwork dates are 30th April to 3rd May so a bit older than some of the other polls. They also show a decent chunk of voters who could still switch their votes so the SNP majority still looks on a knife edge .
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
Needless to say, this Tory Red Waller disagrees with you. I'm not old enough to remember the seventies (or be alive then) but am curious what about the winter of discontent and the seventies in general met your description.
New Labour spent money until they ran out of it, but they had no long term solutions. The Tories have delivered for parts of the country and its time they deliver for the North too.
Ha ha, I'd be gobsmacked if you agreed with me! And no doubt we would come at the winter of discontent and the 70s from ideological opposites to.
I don't personally remember this golden age, I'm roughly the same age as you I think, I'm 43. But when I was a nipper you could ring your doctor, the phone would be answered straightaway, and you would get an appointment the same day. The local park had tennis courts and a bowling green and a permanent keeper who maintained them. All that kind of stuff has gone. Long gone.
The point I am making is that many, many red wallers of my acquaintance, who I discuss all this with, want a return to that world that existed when they were young, in the 50s and 60s, to well-funded public services, including social care and unemployment benefits, park keepers, all that kind of thing, that require higher taxes on business and well off individuals. Social housing, but not the brutalist concrete monstrosities of the past. And the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years have manifestly failed to deliver any of that, in fact they have constantly chipped away at it.
The return of all that stuff is what they expect of Brexit.
The point about park keepers and public tennis courts is one that has puzzled me ... that is, how come we could afford things like that in the 60s and 70s? Were they really halcyon days? I don't think it is to do with higher taxes back then (and by that I mean "take" not "rates") although I could be wrong there.
I think it's to do with what we (and by that I mean government) choose to spend money on - and I think New Labour has a lot to answer for here. Would you rather have park keepers and gardeners or would you prefer diversity officers and translation services for a million and one obscure languages? I know what I'd prefer, what I'd value as a taxpayer.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
Labour is too expensive now. That's the plain truth of it, especially in the public sector.
True, especially when you factor in public sector pension costs, but that doesn't stop you hiring a park keeper rather than a diversity officer. In fact, I'd bet you could hire two park keepers for the price of one office non-job and get a lot more value for money.
Why doesn't the public sector just offer employees defined contribution pensions like everyone else?
I've had this argument previously - and the reply back was that it is too expensive* ! Defined Cont being too expensive compared to DB is true only if you believe David Copperfield really can make the Eiffel Tower disappear. *Accounting technicalities
The thing is that the public sector never really had a proper DB scheme. The Government never funded it properly; the benefits were just paid out of taxation receipts as and when they fell due. Which is bad (because effectively it's a Ponzi scheme that starts to fall apart if demographics change sharply), but workable as long as you never change it.
The issue with moving to a DC scheme is that they would then have to put actual money into actual accounts with each employee's name on it, as opposed to the current system of just adding it to a notional liability to be paid at some point in the future. This would mean they suddenly had to find money each year for two groups of individuals: retired workers, whose pensions were never funded properly so now have to be paid out of taxation, and current workers, whose pensions need to be funded now, and so Government would need to borrow (lots) to meet the extra commitments.
In short, it would be a huge win in the long term, because it solves the Ponzi issue and transfers a lot of the current risks onto individuals from the Government (read: the rest of us), but looks catastrophic for public finances in the short term.
Pardon my ignorance but what on earth is a 'park keeper' that used to exist but doesn't now?
I live with a park on my road, and a children's playground. Its part of what attracted us to this home given we have young kids. It is clean, well-kept, has zero graffiti and is well maintained. I feel comfortable taking my girls to it whenever we want to and letting them run free playing in the park. I see presumably Council staff come to it and cut the grass etc about once a week or so and then go, I've never seen a trash problem or graffiti.
What more should be expected that isn't happening at the minute?
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
Needless to say, this Tory Red Waller disagrees with you. I'm not old enough to remember the seventies (or be alive then) but am curious what about the winter of discontent and the seventies in general met your description.
New Labour spent money until they ran out of it, but they had no long term solutions. The Tories have delivered for parts of the country and its time they deliver for the North too.
Ha ha, I'd be gobsmacked if you agreed with me! And no doubt we would come at the winter of discontent and the 70s from ideological opposites to.
I don't personally remember this golden age, I'm roughly the same age as you I think, I'm 43. But when I was a nipper you could ring your doctor, the phone would be answered straightaway, and you would get an appointment the same day. The local park had tennis courts and a bowling green and a permanent keeper who maintained them. All that kind of stuff has gone. Long gone.
The point I am making is that many, many red wallers of my acquaintance, who I discuss all this with, want a return to that world that existed when they were young, in the 50s and 60s, to well-funded public services, including social care and unemployment benefits, park keepers, all that kind of thing, that require higher taxes on business and well off individuals. Social housing, but not the brutalist concrete monstrosities of the past. And the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years have manifestly failed to deliver any of that, in fact they have constantly chipped away at it.
The return of all that stuff is what they expect of Brexit.
The point about park keepers and public tennis courts is one that has puzzled me ... that is, how come we could afford things like that in the 60s and 70s? Were they really halcyon days? I don't think it is to do with higher taxes back then (and by that I mean "take" not "rates") although I could be wrong there.
I think it's to do with what we (and by that I mean government) choose to spend money on - and I think New Labour has a lot to answer for here. Would you rather have park keepers and gardeners or would you prefer diversity officers and translation services for a million and one obscure languages? I know what I'd prefer, what I'd value as a taxpayer.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
Labour is too expensive now. That's the plain truth of it, especially in the public sector.
True, especially when you factor in public sector pension costs, but that doesn't stop you hiring a park keeper rather than a diversity officer. In fact, I'd bet you could hire two park keepers for the price of one office non-job and get a lot more value for money.
Why doesn't the public sector just offer employees defined contribution pensions like everyone else?
I've had this argument previously - and the reply back was that it is too expensive* ! Defined Cont being too expensive compared to DB is true only if you believe David Copperfield really can make the Eiffel Tower disappear. *Accounting technicalities
Isn’t it because many DB public sector pensions never actually existed as a fund, and are simply paid to the recipients today out of current income?
Adding a DC scheme for current or new employees, means actually spending the contribution cash now to invest in a fund for the future pensions of the currently employed.
Sturgeon's policy is for Scotland to use the currency of a foreign country, not have its own currency. So all its borrowing would be in a foreign currency. There are plenty of examples of countries being unable to borrow in foreign currencies to finance large fiscal deficits.
Worth reading the thread for the level of stupidity we can expect.
Scotland demanding a share of the Bank of England without understanding that that wouldn't help them at all as with 90% of the economy and 90% of the vote any Scottish desires would be ignored. In the way that the ECB did nothing to stop asset inflation in Ireland due to low interest rates prior to 2008.
The worrying thing is - A large chunk of Scots believe this. Presumably helped by the SNPs failure in education over the last 14 years
It goes back longer than 14 years - just look at MalcolmG
The arguments for Independence really only work if you present 5 objectives and hope people don't grasp prior to voting for it that at least 3 of them are mutually exclusive.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
You're approaching this from an idealistic standpoint rather than from reality.
In the short-term, all those things means more government expenditure.
And the way to fund more government expenditure is to have a well growing economy, with low tax rates and regulations, bringing in high tax revenues.
In the long term, perhaps.
Which is what all government's should be working towards, with a deficit to bridge the gap cyclically.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
You're approaching this from an idealistic standpoint rather than from reality.
In the short-term, all those things means more government expenditure.
And the way to fund more government expenditure is to have a well growing economy, with low tax rates and regulations, bringing in high tax revenues.
Trump's key tax breaks did not have the effect of increeasing revenue.
I did not support Trump's proposals or Trump.
If it was up to me, as I've said earlier in this thread, I'd be cutting tax on the poorest in society, which is not what Trump did.
The government is already raising taxes for low earners by stealth by freezing the personal allowance.
Sturgeon's policy is for Scotland to use the currency of a foreign country, not have its own currency. So all its borrowing would be in a foreign currency. There are plenty of examples of countries being unable to borrow in foreign currencies to finance large fiscal deficits.
Worth reading the thread for the level of stupidity we can expect.
Scotland demanding a share of the Bank of England without understanding that that wouldn't help them at all as with 90% of the economy and 90% of the vote any Scottish desires would be ignored. In the way that the ECB did nothing to stop asset inflation in Ireland due to low interest rates prior to 2008.
The worrying thing is - A large chunk of Scots believe this. Presumably helped by the SNPs failure in education over the last 14 years
It goes back longer than 14 years - just look at MalcolmG
The arguments for Independence really only work if you present 5 objectives and hope people don't grasp prior to voting for it that at least 3 of them are mutually exclusive.
I was tempted to mention MalcolmG but like HYUFD the Indy alarm would have sounded in their respective households 🚨
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
That strikes me as a very Little England view, and I agree that is why Labour are struggling.
Little Englanders are in the ascendancy and the Tories are their party, for now.
Call it a Little England view if you like but it's becoming a Bigger England view as the woke BS increases. I'm not sure how Labour copes with that. Does it even want to?
You're relying on the young becoming less "woke" as they grow older. They probably will not. The Overton window will simply shift, as it has done over the past 100 years. Believing in gay marriage used to be woke af.
That would depend on the issue. The EU is an issue where the Overton window shifted in a more socially conservative direction. IMHO, quite a few views that are imbibed at university get dropped in later life.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
Needless to say, this Tory Red Waller disagrees with you. I'm not old enough to remember the seventies (or be alive then) but am curious what about the winter of discontent and the seventies in general met your description.
New Labour spent money until they ran out of it, but they had no long term solutions. The Tories have delivered for parts of the country and its time they deliver for the North too.
Ha ha, I'd be gobsmacked if you agreed with me! And no doubt we would come at the winter of discontent and the 70s from ideological opposites to.
I don't personally remember this golden age, I'm roughly the same age as you I think, I'm 43. But when I was a nipper you could ring your doctor, the phone would be answered straightaway, and you would get an appointment the same day. The local park had tennis courts and a bowling green and a permanent keeper who maintained them. All that kind of stuff has gone. Long gone.
The point I am making is that many, many red wallers of my acquaintance, who I discuss all this with, want a return to that world that existed when they were young, in the 50s and 60s, to well-funded public services, including social care and unemployment benefits, park keepers, all that kind of thing, that require higher taxes on business and well off individuals. Social housing, but not the brutalist concrete monstrosities of the past. And the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years have manifestly failed to deliver any of that, in fact they have constantly chipped away at it.
The return of all that stuff is what they expect of Brexit.
The point about park keepers and public tennis courts is one that has puzzled me ... that is, how come we could afford things like that in the 60s and 70s? Were they really halcyon days? I don't think it is to do with higher taxes back then (and by that I mean "take" not "rates") although I could be wrong there.
I think it's to do with what we (and by that I mean government) choose to spend money on - and I think New Labour has a lot to answer for here. Would you rather have park keepers and gardeners or would you prefer diversity officers and translation services for a million and one obscure languages? I know what I'd prefer, what I'd value as a taxpayer.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
I think too, life was pretty grim in the 1950's and 1960's if you had little money, and lived in a poor district. Housing was certainly worse, in general, than it is today.
Taxes were not, in general, higher then, than they are now, nor public spending as a share of national income. And, we spent a lot more, as a share of national income, on the armed forces than we do today. But, where there is a big difference was demography. The population was significantly younger. We spend much less on pensions and health care than we do today. That freed up money for other things.
I'm the same sort of age as you - 46 - and my memory of the seventies is that it was scruffy, dusty, unfinished, and covered in litter and graffiti. There is too much public squalor today and I would happily introduce the death penalty for graffiti, but I think the level of public squalor has declined since I was very small. Park keepers are an odd one - it's hard to believe they ever really existed outside the pages of Saturday morning comics. But are parks nowadays any less well-kept than in the 70s? My memory may be playing tricks on me but I don't think so. Social housing today is much, much better than that delivered at any point in the last 60 years. I've never had a problem ringing the doctor and getting an appointment the same day. In fact, again, GPs provide a far better level of customer service nowadays than I can remember at any time in the past. (Doctors are also much friendlier than the aloof and supercilious one I remember from my youth, though I may just have been unlucky back then!) What else is better today? Schools, public transport*, waste disposal, roads - the list goes on. There are few things you can convincingly make a case that the state does that it did better at any point in my 46 years on the planet. In short, I'd like the country to have better public services - but in my limited experience the state provides a better lot for its citizens than pretty much at any time in the past.
*granted I was born at something of a nadir for public transport - I think PT probably was better before mass car ownership.
I feel much safer now than I did in the 70s. As a young man I was very conscious of the thugs that were out and about. Maybe it is better because I am now much older, or may be it is just a lot safer.
Probably because you are older. Young men attack other young men - out of sexual rivalry, ultimately. Darwinian, innit. Despite the odd horror headline young men very rarely attack much older men, unless they have the express purpose of robbery, or revenge
Also, there is no kudos in beating up a pensioner. So you ARE safer
Sturgeon's policy is for Scotland to use the currency of a foreign country, not have its own currency. So all its borrowing would be in a foreign currency. There are plenty of examples of countries being unable to borrow in foreign currencies to finance large fiscal deficits.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
You're approaching this from an idealistic standpoint rather than from reality.
In the short-term, all those things means more government expenditure.
And the way to fund more government expenditure is to have a well growing economy, with low tax rates and regulations, bringing in high tax revenues.
In the long term, perhaps.
Which is what all government's should be working towards, with a deficit to bridge the gap cyclically.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
You're approaching this from an idealistic standpoint rather than from reality.
In the short-term, all those things means more government expenditure.
And the way to fund more government expenditure is to have a well growing economy, with low tax rates and regulations, bringing in high tax revenues.
Trump's key tax breaks did not have the effect of increeasing revenue.
I did not support Trump's proposals or Trump.
If it was up to me, as I've said earlier in this thread, I'd be cutting tax on the poorest in society, which is not what Trump did.
The government is already raising taxes for low earners by stealth by freezing the personal allowance.
NEW: Poll of 1,500 Scots for @STVNews has SNP on course for a majority in tomorrow’s election, winning 50% of constituency vote to give the follow seat projection.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
That strikes me as a very Little England view, and I agree that is why Labour are struggling.
Little Englanders are in the ascendancy and the Tories are their party, for now.
Call it a Little England view if you like but it's becoming a Bigger England view as the woke BS increases. I'm not sure how Labour copes with that. Does it even want to?
You're relying on the young becoming less "woke" as they grow older. They probably will not. The Overton window will simply shift, as it has done over the past 100 years. Believing in gay marriage used to be woke af.
That would depend on the issue. The EU is an issue where the Overton window shifted in a more socially conservative direction. IMHO, quite a few views that are imbibed at university get dropped in later life.
I know more people who were vegetarian at university that eat meat now than the other way around too.
The issue with many things is a 'live and let live' attitude. Gay marriage was the right thing to do and allowing it causes no harm for anyone else. Nobody at all is worse off because gays are allowed to marry. So there is literally no reason now for anyone to get worked up about it anymore.
There never was in the first place either, but its easier to say no to something that hasn't happened than to reverse something that has.
But something that benefits some people while not hurting anyone else, like gay marriage, is normally pretty rare. If you are pushing for something where the rights for one group do actually hurt another group, that's when it becomes more difficult.
Hence the EU debates, the "TERF" debates etc aren't remotely as 'simple' as the gay marriage issue was.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
You're approaching this from an idealistic standpoint rather than from reality.
In the short-term, all those things means more government expenditure.
And the way to fund more government expenditure is to have a well growing economy, with low tax rates and regulations, bringing in high tax revenues.
In the long term, perhaps.
Which is what all government's should be working towards, with a deficit to bridge the gap cyclically.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
You're approaching this from an idealistic standpoint rather than from reality.
In the short-term, all those things means more government expenditure.
And the way to fund more government expenditure is to have a well growing economy, with low tax rates and regulations, bringing in high tax revenues.
Trump's key tax breaks did not have the effect of increeasing revenue.
I did not support Trump's proposals or Trump.
If it was up to me, as I've said earlier in this thread, I'd be cutting tax on the poorest in society, which is not what Trump did.
The government is already raising taxes for low earners by stealth by freezing the personal allowance.
That raises taxes on everyone.
And it costs 40%/45% taxpayers more as the effect is to throw more earnings into the higher tax band.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
That strikes me as a very Little England view, and I agree that is why Labour are struggling.
Little Englanders are in the ascendancy and the Tories are their party, for now.
Call it a Little England view if you like but it's becoming a Bigger England view as the woke BS increases. I'm not sure how Labour copes with that. Does it even want to?
You're relying on the young becoming less "woke" as they grow older. They probably will not. The Overton window will simply shift, as it has done over the past 100 years. Believing in gay marriage used to be woke af.
That would depend on the issue. The EU is an issue where the Overton window shifted in a more socially conservative direction. IMHO, quite a few views that are imbibed at university get dropped in later life.
I know more people who were vegetarian at university that eat meat now than the other way around too.
The issue with many things is a 'live and let live' attitude. Gay marriage was the right thing to do and allowing it causes no harm for anyone else. Nobody at all is worse off because gays are allowed to marry. So there is literally no reason now for anyone to get worked up about it anymore.
There never was in the first place either, but its easier to say no to something that hasn't happened than to reverse something that has.
But something that benefits some people while not hurting anyone else, like gay marriage, is normally pretty rare. If you are pushing for something where the rights for one group do actually hurt another group, that's when it becomes more difficult.
Hence the EU debates, the "TERF" debates etc aren't remotely as 'simple' as the gay marriage issue was.
There's a lot more to "woke" than being a vegetarian and being a TERF abusing Twitter warrior.
Sturgeon's policy is for Scotland to use the currency of a foreign country, not have its own currency. So all its borrowing would be in a foreign currency. There are plenty of examples of countries being unable to borrow in foreign currencies to finance large fiscal deficits.
If they want to join the Euro, they’ll have to have their own currency first. It’s that intermediate step that’s the problem.
The idea that a Scots pound could retain a link to Sterling for more than 5 minutes given the borrowing needs and policies of the Scottish government is to go beyond fantasy and into the realm of the absurd. Scotland's pound would depreciate significantly which would hurt but might also reduce our balance of payments deficit to a more manageable level.
Of course, if we have taken on significant debt in Sterling (and our share of the national debt is roughly £160bn) it will go beyond hurt and into something approaching financial catastrophe.
On this morning's conversation, I think both main parties have major challenges. And I think that it is about both membership coalition and voting coalition.
How to achieve a reduction of regional (N/S, but also eg Cornwall is less wealthy, plus Wales and NI on which I am not commenting) inequality.
For the Tories, istm that if the Blue Wall is to stay blue, then they need to move beyond the current 'redirect some spending / investment to the Midlands / North', though I am sure that is helpful in the short-medium term.
I think imbalances need to be corrected in both the tax side and the spend side, and especially distortions to be removed from house prices, and institutionalised, but those areas which benefit from extra wealth currently will not like it.
We parhaps had an example when Business Rates were proposed to be changed to reflect the changed values of property and there was a squealing noise like a million piglets being taken to market. And the Tory Govt ran a mile iirc.
I can imaging Rishi doing some modest rebalancing, but nothing that will makee a big difference
But what happens, if, for example, the Tory membership coalition changes and half of members end up being from north of Birmingham?
For Labour, really a version of the same what will what their younger well-off professional members do when the proposal is that they be taxed more in order to help poorer people, the 1% or 5% not having enough wealth to fund everything?
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
That strikes me as a very Little England view, and I agree that is why Labour are struggling.
Little Englanders are in the ascendancy and the Tories are their party, for now.
Call it a Little England view if you like but it's becoming a Bigger England view as the woke BS increases. I'm not sure how Labour copes with that. Does it even want to?
You're relying on the young becoming less "woke" as they grow older. They probably will not. The Overton window will simply shift, as it has done over the past 100 years. Believing in gay marriage used to be woke af.
That would depend on the issue. The EU is an issue where the Overton window shifted in a more socially conservative direction. IMHO, quite a few views that are imbibed at university get dropped in later life.
I know more people who were vegetarian at university that eat meat now than the other way around too.
The issue with many things is a 'live and let live' attitude. Gay marriage was the right thing to do and allowing it causes no harm for anyone else. Nobody at all is worse off because gays are allowed to marry. So there is literally no reason now for anyone to get worked up about it anymore.
There never was in the first place either, but its easier to say no to something that hasn't happened than to reverse something that has.
But something that benefits some people while not hurting anyone else, like gay marriage, is normally pretty rare. If you are pushing for something where the rights for one group do actually hurt another group, that's when it becomes more difficult.
Hence the EU debates, the "TERF" debates etc aren't remotely as 'simple' as the gay marriage issue was.
There's a lot more to "woke" than being a vegetarian and being a TERF abusing Twitter warrior.
Of course there is, I am unabashedly "woke" on many issues - just not those two.
Blimey. 2nd vaccine booked 3 weeks and 1 day after my first - on Pfizer.
I'm still waiting on my 2nd Pfizer jab. 8 weeks have gone so far.
I got forgotten! 12 weeks was just coming up and nothing. I found out who to call, called and got booked in immediately, so in the end very efficient, provided you are on the ball with dates. Done on Bank Holiday Monday. Interestingly no reaction with my 2nd AZ jab, unlike the first.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
That strikes me as a very Little England view, and I agree that is why Labour are struggling.
Little Englanders are in the ascendancy and the Tories are their party, for now.
Call it a Little England view if you like but it's becoming a Bigger England view as the woke BS increases. I'm not sure how Labour copes with that. Does it even want to?
You're relying on the young becoming less "woke" as they grow older. They probably will not. The Overton window will simply shift, as it has done over the past 100 years. Believing in gay marriage used to be woke af.
That would depend on the issue. The EU is an issue where the Overton window shifted in a more socially conservative direction. IMHO, quite a few views that are imbibed at university get dropped in later life.
I know more people who were vegetarian at university that eat meat now than the other way around too.
The issue with many things is a 'live and let live' attitude. Gay marriage was the right thing to do and allowing it causes no harm for anyone else. Nobody at all is worse off because gays are allowed to marry. So there is literally no reason now for anyone to get worked up about it anymore.
There never was in the first place either, but its easier to say no to something that hasn't happened than to reverse something that has.
But something that benefits some people while not hurting anyone else, like gay marriage, is normally pretty rare. If you are pushing for something where the rights for one group do actually hurt another group, that's when it becomes more difficult.
Hence the EU debates, the "TERF" debates etc aren't remotely as 'simple' as the gay marriage issue was.
As they said, if you don't like gay marriage don't marry a member of the same sex.
Trans rights, critical race theory, curbs on speech are all issues that generate winners and losers, and the losers probably don't get any happier as they get older.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
You're approaching this from an idealistic standpoint rather than from reality.
In the short-term, all those things means more government expenditure.
And the way to fund more government expenditure is to have a well growing economy, with low tax rates and regulations, bringing in high tax revenues.
In the long term, perhaps.
Which is what all government's should be working towards, with a deficit to bridge the gap cyclically.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
You're approaching this from an idealistic standpoint rather than from reality.
In the short-term, all those things means more government expenditure.
And the way to fund more government expenditure is to have a well growing economy, with low tax rates and regulations, bringing in high tax revenues.
Trump's key tax breaks did not have the effect of increeasing revenue.
I did not support Trump's proposals or Trump.
If it was up to me, as I've said earlier in this thread, I'd be cutting tax on the poorest in society, which is not what Trump did.
You big fibber, we all know you loved him really. By the way, forgot to comment on your new(ish) motif Philip. Very English nationalist. I could imagine that being a tattoo on Tommy Robinson's forehead.
Sturgeon's policy is for Scotland to use the currency of a foreign country, not have its own currency. So all its borrowing would be in a foreign currency. There are plenty of examples of countries being unable to borrow in foreign currencies to finance large fiscal deficits.
Worth reading the thread for the level of stupidity we can expect.
Scotland demanding a share of the Bank of England without understanding that that wouldn't help them at all as with 90% of the economy and 90% of the vote any Scottish desires would be ignored. In the way that the ECB did nothing to stop asset inflation in Ireland due to low interest rates prior to 2008.
The worrying thing is - A large chunk of Scots believe this. Presumably helped by the SNPs failure in education over the last 14 years
It goes back longer than 14 years - just look at MalcolmG
The arguments for Independence really only work if you present 5 objectives and hope people don't grasp prior to voting for it that at least 3 of them are mutually exclusive.
One thing that has happened under the SNP is the eradication of British history from the curriculum. My 3 children did not choose history for Standard / Nat 5 grade (GCSE equivalent) and so only did topics through primary and junior school and the first 2 years of senior school. Those topics were the Ancient Egyptians, the Scottish Wars of Independence (against the English), the Jacobites (again, against the English), WW2 (the experience in Edinburgh, no British common thread), Slavery (how bad it was, not Wilberforce and the role of the Royal Navy in ending the trade and no hint of Scottish profit from the trade), and finally US Civil Rights. My kids only have an understanding of wider British history because I have bored them with it.
In a generation, the SNP will have succeeded in separating a generation of kids from any understanding of, or involvement in, a British identity.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
That strikes me as a very Little England view, and I agree that is why Labour are struggling.
Little Englanders are in the ascendancy and the Tories are their party, for now.
Call it a Little England view if you like but it's becoming a Bigger England view as the woke BS increases. I'm not sure how Labour copes with that. Does it even want to?
You're relying on the young becoming less "woke" as they grow older. They probably will not. The Overton window will simply shift, as it has done over the past 100 years. Believing in gay marriage used to be woke af.
Very possibly. I think there are three (interrelated) counterarguments:
1) It's easy to forget that over half of people don't go to University. A lot of the "woke" agenda is driven by people with did, got excited about issues, and use social media to amplify their voices. However, they do not necessarily represent the consensus among their age group.
2) Priorities change as people settle down and have children, and stop caring about whatever it was that exercised them as students.
3) It's easy to support rights for a particular group in principle with seemingly no consequences, but as you get older you realise that the world is more complicated, and (for example) the trans rights issue becomes more difficult if you're suddenly worried about your daughter being assaulted in a public facility.
NEW: Final @IpsosMORI poll before the Scottish Election tomorrow shows chances of an SNP majority are finely balanced. Constituency voting intention: •SNP: 50% (-3 compared with our last poll) •Lab: 22% (+4) •Con: 20% (nc) •LD: 6% (nc) •Grn: 2% (nc) •Other: 1% (nc) https://twitter.com/KellyIpsosMORI/status/1389911944593817603/photo/1
Sturgeon's policy is for Scotland to use the currency of a foreign country, not have its own currency. So all its borrowing would be in a foreign currency. There are plenty of examples of countries being unable to borrow in foreign currencies to finance large fiscal deficits.
Worth reading the thread for the level of stupidity we can expect.
Scotland demanding a share of the Bank of England without understanding that that wouldn't help them at all as with 90% of the economy and 90% of the vote any Scottish desires would be ignored. In the way that the ECB did nothing to stop asset inflation in Ireland due to low interest rates prior to 2008.
The worrying thing is - A large chunk of Scots believe this. Presumably helped by the SNPs failure in education over the last 14 years
It goes back longer than 14 years - just look at MalcolmG
The arguments for Independence really only work if you present 5 objectives and hope people don't grasp prior to voting for it that at least 3 of them are mutually exclusive.
One thing that has happened under the SNP is the eradication of British history from the curriculum. My 3 children did not choose history for Standard / Nat 5 grade (GCSE equivalent) and so only did topics through primary and junior school and the first 2 years of senior school. Those topics were the Ancient Egyptians, the Scottish Wars of Independence (against the English), the Jacobites (again, against the English), WW2 (the experience in Edinburgh, no British common thread), Slavery (how the bad it was, not Wilberforce and the role of the Royal Navy in ending the trade and no hint of Scottish profit from the trade), and finally US Civil Rights. My kids only have an understanding of wider British history because I have bored them with it.
In a generation, the SNP will have succeeded in separating a generation of kids from any understanding of, or involvement in, a British identity.
that is nationalists for you. They don't burn books anymore they just carefully remove any they don't like from a curriculum.
"One Labour adviser said: “Over the last two years, lots and lots of people have moved out of London. That will have been accelerated by Covid. We read a lot about the red wall. No one has gone to Wycombe to find out what is driving down Steve Baker’s majority.
“The next Labour party that wins a national election is not going to win back all of the red wall, it is not going to win back all of Scotland, or all the southern seats it could win, it will do a little bit of everything, and it will probably involve seats like Bournemouth and High Wycombe.”
Nope - because the policies Labour need to win Bournemouth and High Wycombe won't work up north.
A little bit of everything isn't going to solve the issue of making Labour electable as you need a coherent set of policies and once you start cherry picking you don't have that.
Yes, there are two broad coalitions in British politics - Not-Labour and Not-Tories. But to win, the Not-Tories coalition has to cover a lot more mutually antagnostic ground (i.e. it has to appeal to Hartlepool and Hampstead, as well as Livingston and Llanelli). Whereas Not-Labour can win by basically winning medium- and small-town England plus a scattering of suburbs of Celts. Labour also faces the problem at present that if it tries to go too far towards Hartlepool it loses votes in Hampstead to Lib Dems and Greens, while if it tries to go too far towards Hampstead it loses votes in Hartlepool to the Conservatives. The Tories don't at present face an equivalent threat, having seen off the UKIP/Brexit/Reform threat. For now.
Except they do.
I would argue that the former red wall wants government spending — it wants the government to create jobs, investment, infrastructure. The Tory heartland wants thrift, less government intervention and low taxes.
How do you reconcile that over a long term? You can’t really. The more the Government goes big state on the North, it risks making the same mistake Labour did with their heartland.
This is a good point. Red wallers want to be able to ring their GP and get an appointment asap. They want, when they visit the GP or go to hospital, to see an English doctor, not one with a 'funny' accent. They want nice, well-maintained areas to live in. They want responsive councils who can quickly pick up fly tipping, or fill a pothole. They want comprehensive social care for themselves or their elderly relatives. They want the rich - who have been painted as liberal metropolitan elitist Remainers but in reality contains many Tories and their donors in the shires - to pay more tax to help fund all this. They want excellent education, including vocational education. They want the investment to attract industry.
They expect Brexit, and by extension the Tories, to deliver all this.
The problem is the Tory heartlands don't want to pay tax to improve the red wall. They didn't in the 80s when it deindustrialised, they didn't after the GFC, preferring instead austerity, and they don't now.
That tension can't last.
Almost everyone wants the NHS to work well. Almost everyone wants a nice, well-maintained area to live in. Almost everyone wants responsive Councils that deal with potholes and dly tipping. Almost everyone wants social care sorting. Almost everyone wants good jobs in their area.
Almost nobody wants to pay taxes, or social care charges themselves.
You are approaching this from a perspective that a good NHS etc means higher taxes, rather than a better economy with low taxes. If people can have a working economy, a decent job, to afford their own home, an NHS that works etc with low taxes then that should be enough for everybody but the most extreme zealots.
I take your point. The thing is, Brexit voters in the red wall by and large remember when all this stuff existed - in their youth. And by and large it did, thanks to the post-war settlement. Red wallers have been conditioned to think all this was washed away by joining the EU, and forriners. When in reality it was washed away by Fatcher and the economic policies that the Tories still get tumescent for. That haven't delivered these outcomes in the red wall for 40 years. New Labour improved things, but not enough, which is partly why they're shafted now.
Needless to say, this Tory Red Waller disagrees with you. I'm not old enough to remember the seventies (or be alive then) but am curious what about the winter of discontent and the seventies in general met your description.
New Labour spent money until they ran out of it, but they had no long term solutions. The Tories have delivered for parts of the country and its time they deliver for the North too.
Ha ha, I'd be gobsmacked if you agreed with me! And no doubt we would come at the winter of discontent and the 70s from ideological opposites to.
I don't personally remember this golden age, I'm roughly the same age as you I think, I'm 43. But when I was a nipper you could ring your doctor, the phone would be answered straightaway, and you would get an appointment the same day. The local park had tennis courts and a bowling green and a permanent keeper who maintained them. All that kind of stuff has gone. Long gone.
The point I am making is that many, many red wallers of my acquaintance, who I discuss all this with, want a return to that world that existed when they were young, in the 50s and 60s, to well-funded public services, including social care and unemployment benefits, park keepers, all that kind of thing, that require higher taxes on business and well off individuals. Social housing, but not the brutalist concrete monstrosities of the past. And the economic orthodoxies of the past 40 years have manifestly failed to deliver any of that, in fact they have constantly chipped away at it.
The return of all that stuff is what they expect of Brexit.
The point about park keepers and public tennis courts is one that has puzzled me ... that is, how come we could afford things like that in the 60s and 70s? Were they really halcyon days? I don't think it is to do with higher taxes back then (and by that I mean "take" not "rates") although I could be wrong there.
I think it's to do with what we (and by that I mean government) choose to spend money on - and I think New Labour has a lot to answer for here. Would you rather have park keepers and gardeners or would you prefer diversity officers and translation services for a million and one obscure languages? I know what I'd prefer, what I'd value as a taxpayer.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
I think too, life was pretty grim in the 1950's and 1960's if you had little money, and lived in a poor district. Housing was certainly worse, in general, than it is today.
Taxes were not, in general, higher then, than they are now, nor public spending as a share of national income. And, we spent a lot more, as a share of national income, on the armed forces than we do today. But, where there is a big difference was demography. The population was significantly younger. We spend much less on pensions and health care than we do today. That freed up money for other things.
I think the imaginary nirvana of the 1970s is no more real than that of the 1950s for slightly older people.
Just reflect on the basic things - the average temperature at which a house was run, most people not having central heating or double glazing.
A quarter of family income spent on food, as opposed to just over 10% now.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
That strikes me as a very Little England view, and I agree that is why Labour are struggling.
Little Englanders are in the ascendancy and the Tories are their party, for now.
Call it a Little England view if you like but it's becoming a Bigger England view as the woke BS increases. I'm not sure how Labour copes with that. Does it even want to?
You're relying on the young becoming less "woke" as they grow older. They probably will not. The Overton window will simply shift, as it has done over the past 100 years. Believing in gay marriage used to be woke af.
That would depend on the issue. The EU is an issue where the Overton window shifted in a more socially conservative direction. IMHO, quite a few views that are imbibed at university get dropped in later life.
I know more people who were vegetarian at university that eat meat now than the other way around too.
The issue with many things is a 'live and let live' attitude. Gay marriage was the right thing to do and allowing it causes no harm for anyone else. Nobody at all is worse off because gays are allowed to marry. So there is literally no reason now for anyone to get worked up about it anymore.
There never was in the first place either, but its easier to say no to something that hasn't happened than to reverse something that has.
But something that benefits some people while not hurting anyone else, like gay marriage, is normally pretty rare. If you are pushing for something where the rights for one group do actually hurt another group, that's when it becomes more difficult.
Hence the EU debates, the "TERF" debates etc aren't remotely as 'simple' as the gay marriage issue was.
As they said, if you don't like gay marriage don't marry a member of the same sex.
Trans rights, critical race theory, curbs on speech are all issues that generate winners and losers, and the losers probably don't get any happier as they get older.
Indeed. The problem is that equality has pretty much been achieved legislatively, with the various sex discrimination acts and gay marriage over the years.
What the culture warriors are now fighting for is much more than that - it’s discrimination again, just in the ‘other’ direction to what we had a few decades ago.
MLK was right. Treat humans as humans, stop seeing race everywhere.
This, to me, epitomizes the new divide in British politics. And I think it's why Labour will continue to struggle ... it is on the side of diversity officers and translation services, which your ordinary voter thinks is BS.
That strikes me as a very Little England view, and I agree that is why Labour are struggling.
Little Englanders are in the ascendancy and the Tories are their party, for now.
Call it a Little England view if you like but it's becoming a Bigger England view as the woke BS increases. I'm not sure how Labour copes with that. Does it even want to?
You're relying on the young becoming less "woke" as they grow older. They probably will not. The Overton window will simply shift, as it has done over the past 100 years. Believing in gay marriage used to be woke af.
Very possibly. I think there are three (interrelated) counterarguments:
1) It's easy to forget that over half of people don't go to University. A lot of the "woke" agenda is driven by people with did, got excited about issues, and use social media to amplify their voices. However, they do not necessarily represent the consensus among their age group.
2) Priorities change as people settle down and have children, and stop caring about whatever it was that exercised them as students.
3) It's easy to support rights for a particular group in principle with seemingly no consequences, but as you get older you realise that the world is more complicated, and (for example) the trans rights issue becomes more difficult if you're suddenly worried about your daughter being assaulted in a public facility.
I counteract your first point somewhat from personal experience.
My girlfriend is 25, from Ashington, and never went to university and neither did many of her friends.
They don't spend their time discussing pronouns socially, obviously — they're not weirdos, but their views on things like self-ID and BLM are incredibly "woke" and would make some of those here on the right blush. They don't discuss them because they're just normal for them and their age group, it seems.
Maybe they're unusual but I would guess not. They spent their formative years on Facebook groups and watching YouTube influencers, both British and American, where these things are completely normalised.
In a generation, the SNP will have succeeded in separating a generation of kids from any understanding of, or involvement in, a British identity.
In a generation, the SNP will have succeeded in separating a generation of kids from any understanding of maths, science, literature or geography...
Don't forget economics. no longer taught in state schools. You have to recognise the strategic genius of that.
Absolutely. I actually admire the singular determination of the SNP in their long march to independence. I am amazed by the stupidity of various British institutions in not defending themselves and pushing back.
Comments
This is why I'm so angry at the scientists who produce these garbage models. The politicians are going to be political, I expect that. The scientists acting as they have done to give the politicians the ammunition with wildly incorrect models is why we are where we are.
If I need the doc I too make an appointment with an app now, but it is generally for a fortnight's time away - if I need something urgently I need to ring the surgery, stay in a queue for God knows how long, and it's all a bit pot luck.
But those things haven't improved the services that many people value, that add an almost intangible quality to daily life, that I've outlined in my previous comments.
And people are saddled with debt now. In the past they had disposable income to buy stuff, or could save to buy stuff. Now it's credit and leases.
But I don't have the time or inclination to debate endlessly about economic approaches. I just wanted to say what many red waller Brexiteers want and expect. And it ain't Singapore-on-Thames.
Taxes were not, in general, higher then, than they are now, nor public spending as a share of national income. And, we spent a lot more, as a share of national income, on the armed forces than we do today. But, where there is a big difference was demography. The population was significantly younger. We spend much less on pensions and health care than we do today. That freed up money for other things.
We've also seen a doubling in fine art prices, and an unbelievable spike in meaningless crap like Bitcoin.
OK - here's something more recent on it: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dna-data-storage-is-closer-than-you-think/
The time jobs for life became less reliable, and inflation / unemployment started to have seriously higher levels, was from the oil shock in 1973 - which did happen at the time of EU accession, which may account for something.
But that requires Brexit voters to be 'by and large' more than 55 to remember it as a small child.
*Nationally* nearly half voted for Brexit in the age group 24-49 (54:46 for remain).
Which is a lot. Especially a lot of young people in Red Wall areas, when the Brexit percentage would be much higher.
PleaseletitbeCole-HamiltonpleaseletitbeCole-HamiltonpleaseletitbeCole-Hamilton
It strikes me that Johnson is a Basil Seal LARP.
Pre-COVID, I'd meet both Tom Knight and Drew Endy at the annual iGEM Jamboree. Tom is retired now but he is/was treated something like a god by the kids involved in the competition.
Defined Cont being too expensive compared to DB is true only if you believe David Copperfield really can make the Eiffel Tower disappear.
*Accounting technicalities
With just 2% of the regional vote, former first minister Alex Salmond’s new party Alba would probably fail to win a seat should the poll be replicated at the ballot boxes on Thursday.
I'm not really keen on you calling where I live a "dump" but if it was just inflation that was an issue then that should have seen inflation up here too. That houses have surged in London possibly has more to do with issues in London and less to do with finance.
London's population has increased 17.5% from 2007 to 2019. Has construction kept place to ensure that total housing available has also gone up by 17.5% in the same time?
Or are there instead more people expected to live without housing supply increasing at the same rate as demand?
Someone’s got it massively wrong. Then again, the Scottish elections look quite hard to poll?
I went back to my hometown for the first time in decades, a couple of years ago. What astonished me was the sense of new prosperity, the chic coffee bars and gleaming gastropubs, little art galleries which used to be chippies
So I'm really not sure it was all better back then
However I do agree - and have said before - that a party that promised to Get The Little Things Right - potholes, old phone boxes (get rid), roaring motorbikes (ditto), graffiti, littering, fly tipping - would prosper. Make our towns and cities prettier
We know you can't eradicate poverty, but cleaning the pavement would be a decent start
A couple earning £40,000 a year between them can afford a decent house in a seat like Bishop Auckland or Sedgefield. A couple earning £60,000 a year between them in a lot of London can't.
Yep, a lot of younger people have assimilated the views of their parents, sadly.
SNP 50
CON 22
Lab 20
LD 6
Green 2
List
SNP 39
CON 23
Lab 18
Green 12
LD 4
Alba 2
Grp 1: SNP short of majority & fewer MSPs, pro indy majority, Tories 2nd - ComRes
Grp 2: SNP majority likely, Tories 2nd - YG, Opinium, Mori, Survation, BMG
Grp 3: SNP majority 50/50, Alba MSPs possible, Tories 2nd - P'base
#sp21
https://twitter.com/markdiffley1/status/1389905302590529543
Park keepers are an odd one - it's hard to believe they ever really existed outside the pages of Saturday morning comics. But are parks nowadays any less well-kept than in the 70s? My memory may be playing tricks on me but I don't think so.
Social housing today is much, much better than that delivered at any point in the last 60 years.
I've never had a problem ringing the doctor and getting an appointment the same day. In fact, again, GPs provide a far better level of customer service nowadays than I can remember at any time in the past. (Doctors are also much friendlier than the aloof and supercilious one I remember from my youth, though I may just have been unlucky back then!)
What else is better today? Schools, public transport*, waste disposal, roads - the list goes on. There are few things you can convincingly make a case that the state does that it did better at any point in my 46 years on the planet.
In short, I'd like the country to have better public services - but in my limited experience the state provides a better lot for its citizens than pretty much at any time in the past.
*granted I was born at something of a nadir for public transport - I think PT probably was better before mass car ownership.
The polls were saying more or less the same thing 2 weeks ago, the ComRes is very much the outlier. In fact the SNP constituency vote hasn't polled at 42% since last Oct.
As I said, heroes or zeros come Saturday.
I'm sure both are factors. House prices are complicated, since houses are also goods as well as assets. Much better to consider purer financial assets like bonds, Bitcoin or fine art.
https://twitter.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/1389906169645371392?s=19
I think it could be a fantastic day for Johnson on Friday.
https://twitter.com/Frances_Coppola/status/1389905446547468292?s=20
Grp 1: SNP short of majority & fewer MSPs, pro indy majority, Tories 2nd - ComRes
Grp 2: SNP majority likely, Tories 2nd - YG, Opinium, Mori, Survation, BMG
Grp 3: SNP majority 50/50, Alba MSPs possible, Tories 2nd - P'base
#sp21
https://twitter.com/markdiffley1/status/1389905302590529543?s=20
That’s why I think we’ll be seeing a few uncharacteristic missteps from her going forward.
Johnson seems to defy gravity.
Scotland demanding a share of the Bank of England without understanding that that wouldn't help them at all as with 90% of the economy and 90% of the vote any Scottish desires would be ignored. In the way that the ECB did nothing to stop asset inflation in Ireland due to low interest rates prior to 2008.
As against that, there were more well-paid jobs for people (especially men) who did not have much in the way of qualifications. And, for the average professional person, earning a decent living was much easier in the 1970's than it is today - there was nothing like the tangle of expensive regulation you have to deal with now. And, as a child, you were left pretty much to your own devices in a way that is unthinkable today. We had park keepers, but also, a lot more vandalism than today.
Average of the 5 polls published in last 24 hours
SNP 49/38
Con 22/22
Lab 21/18
Green - /10
LD 7/6
Alba -/3
On a uniform projection = 64 SNP seats.
In short polls suggest 50/50 chance of SNP overall majority.
https://twitter.com/WhatScotsThink/status/1389908055878426628?s=20
Modern Monetary Theory is both a joke and the recognition of reality - reality is suspended until at some point it just isn't. Sadly by that point it's too late.
That was already known no longer to be the case when I studied Economics twenty years ago.
The issue with moving to a DC scheme is that they would then have to put actual money into actual accounts with each employee's name on it, as opposed to the current system of just adding it to a notional liability to be paid at some point in the future. This would mean they suddenly had to find money each year for two groups of individuals: retired workers, whose pensions were never funded properly so now have to be paid out of taxation, and current workers, whose pensions need to be funded now, and so Government would need to borrow (lots) to meet the extra commitments.
In short, it would be a huge win in the long term, because it solves the Ponzi issue and transfers a lot of the current risks onto individuals from the Government (read: the rest of us), but looks catastrophic for public finances in the short term.
I live with a park on my road, and a children's playground. Its part of what attracted us to this home given we have young kids. It is clean, well-kept, has zero graffiti and is well maintained. I feel comfortable taking my girls to it whenever we want to and letting them run free playing in the park. I see presumably Council staff come to it and cut the grass etc about once a week or so and then go, I've never seen a trash problem or graffiti.
What more should be expected that isn't happening at the minute?
Adding a DC scheme for current or new employees, means actually spending the contribution cash now to invest in a fund for the future pensions of the currently employed.
The arguments for Independence really only work if you present 5 objectives and hope people don't grasp prior to voting for it that at least 3 of them are mutually exclusive.
2nd vaccine booked 3 weeks and 1 day after my first - on Pfizer.
Also, there is no kudos in beating up a pensioner. So you ARE safer
Hard to imagine any Labour movers would go to the Conservatives so this must be encouraging for the SNP who could surprise on the upside .
https://twitter.com/Dennynews/status/1389891911046123520?s=20
I still think far too much is uncertain to make value bets on this election.
The issue with many things is a 'live and let live' attitude. Gay marriage was the right thing to do and allowing it causes no harm for anyone else. Nobody at all is worse off because gays are allowed to marry. So there is literally no reason now for anyone to get worked up about it anymore.
There never was in the first place either, but its easier to say no to something that hasn't happened than to reverse something that has.
But something that benefits some people while not hurting anyone else, like gay marriage, is normally pretty rare. If you are pushing for something where the rights for one group do actually hurt another group, that's when it becomes more difficult.
Hence the EU debates, the "TERF" debates etc aren't remotely as 'simple' as the gay marriage issue was.
Of course, if we have taken on significant debt in Sterling (and our share of the national debt is roughly £160bn) it will go beyond hurt and into something approaching financial catastrophe.
How to achieve a reduction of regional (N/S, but also eg Cornwall is less wealthy, plus Wales and NI on which I am not commenting) inequality.
For the Tories, istm that if the Blue Wall is to stay blue, then they need to move beyond the current 'redirect some spending / investment to the Midlands / North', though I am sure that is helpful in the short-medium term.
I think imbalances need to be corrected in both the tax side and the spend side, and especially distortions to be removed from house prices, and institutionalised, but those areas which benefit from extra wealth currently will not like it.
We parhaps had an example when Business Rates were proposed to be changed to reflect the changed values of property and there was a squealing noise like a million piglets being taken to market. And the Tory Govt ran a mile iirc.
I can imaging Rishi doing some modest rebalancing, but nothing that will makee a big difference
But what happens, if, for example, the Tory membership coalition changes and half of members end up being from north of Birmingham?
For Labour, really a version of the same what will what their younger well-off professional members do when the proposal is that they be taxed more in order to help poorer people, the 1% or 5% not having enough wealth to fund everything?
Trans rights, critical race theory, curbs on speech are all issues that generate winners and losers, and the losers probably don't get any happier as they get older.
In a generation, the SNP will have succeeded in separating a generation of kids from any understanding of, or involvement in, a British identity.
1) It's easy to forget that over half of people don't go to University. A lot of the "woke" agenda is driven by people with did, got excited about issues, and use social media to amplify their voices. However, they do not necessarily represent the consensus among their age group.
2) Priorities change as people settle down and have children, and stop caring about whatever it was that exercised them as students.
3) It's easy to support rights for a particular group in principle with seemingly no consequences, but as you get older you realise that the world is more complicated, and (for example) the trans rights issue becomes more difficult if you're suddenly worried about your daughter being assaulted in a public facility.
I am sure that it is character forming or something.
•SNP: 50% (-3 compared with our last poll)
•Lab: 22% (+4)
•Con: 20% (nc)
•LD: 6% (nc)
•Grn: 2% (nc)
•Other: 1% (nc) https://twitter.com/KellyIpsosMORI/status/1389911944593817603/photo/1
Just reflect on the basic things - the average temperature at which a house was run, most people not having central heating or double glazing.
A quarter of family income spent on food, as opposed to just over 10% now.
etc etc etc
What the culture warriors are now fighting for is much more than that - it’s discrimination again, just in the ‘other’ direction to what we had a few decades ago.
MLK was right. Treat humans as humans, stop seeing race everywhere.
My girlfriend is 25, from Ashington, and never went to university and neither did many of her friends.
They don't spend their time discussing pronouns socially, obviously — they're not weirdos, but their views on things like self-ID and BLM are incredibly "woke" and would make some of those here on the right blush. They don't discuss them because they're just normal for them and their age group, it seems.
Maybe they're unusual but I would guess not. They spent their formative years on Facebook groups and watching YouTube influencers, both British and American, where these things are completely normalised.