Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. Sign in or register to get started.

The front pages that should frighten ministers – politicalbetting.com

13468913

Comments



  • Daniel Hannan said that quote in May 2015
    Vote Leave was founded in October 2015

    So how did Daniel Hannan of Vote Leave say that in May 2015 given that Vote Leave hadn't even been created by then?

    That's like saying RochdalePioneers of the Liberal Democrats says we should vote Labour so even Liberal Democrats are saying vote Labour . . . by quoting him from when he was in the Labour Party and before he joined the Liberal Democrats.

    The Vote Leave line was crystal clear that we would leave the Single Market. Anything Hannan said before he joined Vote Leave was not said by Vote Leave.

    Ah, you mean Hannan was chatting any old soothing shit for public consumption when the unexpected prospect of a referendum had hardly entered people's consciousness, and the result was very much moot? Gotcha.
  • TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    It is very good that wages are rising albeit that creates inflationary pressure as discussed yesterday on here in the morning and, it turns out, by the Bank of England in the afternoon (PB leading the way).

    At some point the buck has to stop and rising wages and prices and wages and prices become a problem for the country in all sorts of ways that we won't repeat. The BoE is worried about it which seems a reasonably independent institution.

    But the issue that policy makers have to grapple with, and the comparison is with the supermarkets and their treatment of their suppliers, is whether the benefit to the whole country (via lower or suppressed wages/prices) is more important than the factor inputs (ie wages in this case) being kept low.

    No rising wages are not a problem, they're an entirely good thing so long as the market can afford them.

    For too many years people have claimed that rising prices are a good thing, while rising wages are a bad one. That misrepresentation has to be reversed.
    Rising wages lead to rising prices. Rising prices can be a problem. Productivity gains are what can break the cycle.
    Except that rising prices has been something we've been putting up with in this country for decades. Prices have been soaring for certain things.

    Rising prices aren't a problem so long as they're rising slower than wages. When prices are rising faster than wages (as has happened) then that's a problem.

    Its great to see a reversal.
    We have wage growth of around 7% and current expected inflation of around 4%. As a policy maker would you be nervous?
    No. That's real wage growth of 3% that is absolutely fantastic and should be celebrated.

    For too long we've had potentially double-digit price rises and 1% wage rises. That's what I didn't like.
    We shall see now long that is sustainable. As I said the BoE is nervous but what do they know.
    I'm glad that they're nervous but file it under "good problems to have".

    Which problem would you rather have:

    7% pay rise, 4% price rise
    1% pay rise, 10% price rise
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 21,723
    Any SKS fans explain why Lab are on 32 in latest YG

    Thanks in advance
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,145

    I have this image of the ghost of Jim Callaghan exiting the aircraft and in chorus with all the PB Boris fanbois exclaiming "crisis, what crisis?"

    Sunny Jim never said it when he was alive though.
    It is nonetheless an urban myth that lives on in the British psyche.

    In that case scratch out Jim, and just leave it as a chorus of PB fanbois.
    I believe it was a Sun headline which was then used to beat Callaghan over the issue. A reminder of when the Sun had influence, so at least some things have got better!
    Its astonishing how many people believe he actually said those words. My ex car-share, a guy in his 60's, claims he remembers seeing him say it on the news. And yet he never said that, that was the headline that has morphed into a 'quote'.

    The other classic is 'The batsman's Holding the bowler's Willey' (or maybe the other way round), Sadly debunked by the great man himself (Brian Johnson) and after extensive searches of the radio archives.
    Would have been great, but never really happened.

    Memory is weird. Stephen Jay Gould told a story about a childhood remembrance, that when he went to the place many years later he realised could not have happened the way he remembered it. And yet he could still remember it that way. This is similar in some ways to the liars that we occasionally encounter, who convince themselves they are telling the truth (the PM for one, has been suggested).
    The PM was a child last year?
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation.
    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.
    So what you’re saying is, you’ve had enough of facts, let’s go with the feel.

    I really need to add that to my Brexit matrix of excuses;

    (5) Claim that all human existence is essentially unknowable and that Brexit must be understood as beyond epistemology.
    There are no facts in economics, only opinions and then someone theory based on their opinion. Economics isn't a science.
  • algarkirkalgarkirk Posts: 10,343

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    It is a fair question and why capitals
    The 'lump of labour fallacy' is a fallacy but does not suspend other economic laws, such as price, supply and demand

  • stodgestodge Posts: 12,741
    Morning all :)

    In response to one or two random meanderings - local Government finance reform, good luck with that, the ultimate poisoned chalice. Arguably the main factor in the fall of Margaret Thatcher and if it can bring down the individual hailed by many as the most successful British PM since the war, think what it could do to those of lesser calibre.

    Inflation - another trip down memory lane. I suppose if inflation is 3% and your savings are getting 0.25% you'll not be dancing in the streets. If your mortgage rate is 0.25% you will be dancing in the street. At some point, interest rates are going to have to rise in response to other economic factors - the methadone of QE will wear off one day.

    Had a look at the passenger transport numbers - it seems the Underground has settled to a new normal of just over half of pre-Covid levels during the week and two thirds (or slightly higher) at the weekend. The trains have picked up with passenger numbers now 60-62% of pre-Covid numbers having been as high as 68% in that first full week of September when everybody was optimistically, with a song in their heart and a spring in their step, marching back to their long-forgotten desks (apparently).

    I went through Waterloo on Tuesday - certainly signs of more passengers coming off the commuter trains but nowhere near the human stampede of pre-Covid times. The evening "rush" which used to see the concourse thronged with passengers trying to get home, is nothing like it was either.

    Certainly plenty of light commercial traffic out there (114% of pre-Covid). Does this explain our driver shortage issues? It may be one part of it - last Sunday 134% of pre-Covid light commercial traffic and 135% of HGVs. Our overheating post-Covid economy requires to be fed and watered - there are plenty of lorries on the road but clearly not enough to satisfy our voracious appetite for whatever it is we suddenly want but didn't have for 16 months.
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,145



    Daniel Hannan said that quote in May 2015
    Vote Leave was founded in October 2015

    So how did Daniel Hannan of Vote Leave say that in May 2015 given that Vote Leave hadn't even been created by then?

    That's like saying RochdalePioneers of the Liberal Democrats says we should vote Labour so even Liberal Democrats are saying vote Labour . . . by quoting him from when he was in the Labour Party and before he joined the Liberal Democrats.

    The Vote Leave line was crystal clear that we would leave the Single Market. Anything Hannan said before he joined Vote Leave was not said by Vote Leave.

    Ah, you mean Hannan was chatting any old soothing shit for public consumption when the unexpected prospect of a referendum had hardly entered people's consciousness, and the result was very much moot? Gotcha.
    There is also the issue of why the referendum was agreed in the first place. And whose public statements led to that.
  • nico679nico679 Posts: 4,534
    The YouGov poll isn’t good for Labour but the Green vote at 9% is very high and much of that would move to Labour in a GE .

    In terms of the haulage industry a survey there points a different picture to the gaslighting from Schapps . No one is saying there aren’t issues across Europe but losing 19,000 EU drivers is going to make things worse unless that is you’re a fully paid up member to the Brexit Unicorn !
  • algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    It is a fair question and why capitals
    It’s a false statement. See above for what actually happened when Britain imported EU migrants.

  • Tory lead with YouGov up to seven points on eve of Labour conference

    CON 39 (n/c)
    LAB 32 (-3)
    LD 10 (+3)
    GREEN 9 (+2)
    REF UK 3 (n/c)

    Number of Con-Lab switchers halved since Labour lead a fortnight ago, fewer 2019 Tories don't know

    One in five Lab voters backing other parties

    In this crisis labour's polling must be of great concern to their supporters

    The question is why

    And on the fuel shortages, as has been commented on here, a few filling stations closed will not impact on the public

    It would have to be widespread across the country and causing huge queues


  • Daniel Hannan said that quote in May 2015
    Vote Leave was founded in October 2015

    So how did Daniel Hannan of Vote Leave say that in May 2015 given that Vote Leave hadn't even been created by then?

    That's like saying RochdalePioneers of the Liberal Democrats says we should vote Labour so even Liberal Democrats are saying vote Labour . . . by quoting him from when he was in the Labour Party and before he joined the Liberal Democrats.

    The Vote Leave line was crystal clear that we would leave the Single Market. Anything Hannan said before he joined Vote Leave was not said by Vote Leave.

    Ah, you mean Hannan was chatting any old soothing shit for public consumption when the unexpected prospect of a referendum had hardly entered people's consciousness, and the result was very much moot? Gotcha.
    If you have an issue with Hannan take it up with Hannan, but to caption anything he said before he joined Vote Leave as being said by Vote Leave is a lie pure and simple.

    At the referendum Vote Leave essentially put together a manifesto, like a party would at an election, and that manifesto said explicitly that we would leave the Single Market. It was there in black and white.
  • HYUFD said:

    Taz said:

    HYUFD said:

    Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.

    It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing
    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355

    Sounds good from labour. Now they need to do something about second home owners, holiday lets and Airbnb’s that blight many rural and coastal communities pricing locals and workers needed locally out. Giving people priority on a new build in Blackburn or Stoke May be good for that area but labour needs to do much much more.
    Not really.

    The six month priority does not do much. If a developer can get £320k in 6 months or £300k from a first time buyer now, they will generally wait out the 6 months.

    And as for restricting foreign purchasers in new developments, setting it at 50% is surely a piss take? For a few developments it might be better than the status quo but try selling "we will look after you, only half the new homes we are building are going to rich foreigners" on the doorstep.
    Should not be 6 months then, should be permanent until we resolve the decline in home ownership. New builds should only be able to be bought by first time buyers for the foreseeable future in London and the Home Counties as that is where the housing shortage is and that is where the fewest people are able to afford to be able to get on the ladder. Once they are on the ladder and have bought their property they can then move up and buy existing properties, it is getting them on the ladder that is the issue.

    50% is betting than nothing but yes more could be done to ensure native Londoners can buy property in the capital, especially central London and not just foreign investors
    Toronto has a 15% foreign non resident speculation tax. Let's have the same here.
  • MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation.
    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.
    Economics isn't really a hard science but econometric techniques, if applied properly, can yield useful insights. Simply dismissing their arguments because you disagree with their findings just makes you look silly.
    Plenty of economists do work in finance of course, and some of them are doing quite well out of it (cough). It's by no means the bad ones who stay in academia either. If anything it's a profession where wages tend to be inversely related to talent at the top, in my experience, because the best economists tend to gravitate towards academia and research careers.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812
    edited September 2021
    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation.
    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.
    So what you’re saying is, you’ve had enough of facts, let’s go with the feel.

    I really need to add that to my Brexit matrix of excuses;

    (5) Claim that all human existence is essentially unknowable and that Brexit must be understood as beyond epistemology.
    There are no facts in economics, only opinions and then someone theory based on their opinion. Economics isn't a science.
    How’s that policy to ban all residential property rentals going for you? Thought it through a bit yet?
  • CarnyxCarnyx Posts: 39,145


    Tory lead with YouGov up to seven points on eve of Labour conference

    CON 39 (n/c)
    LAB 32 (-3)
    LD 10 (+3)
    GREEN 9 (+2)
    REF UK 3 (n/c)

    Number of Con-Lab switchers halved since Labour lead a fortnight ago, fewer 2019 Tories don't know

    One in five Lab voters backing other parties

    In this crisis labour's polling must be of great concern to their supporters

    The question is why

    And on the fuel shortages, as has been commented on here, a few filling stations closed will not impact on the public

    It would have to be widespread across the country and causing huge queues

    Just been reported that 100 out of 1200 BP stations are short of at least one type of fuel. Doesn't take much more for 'a few' to become 'quite a few' completely closed. And you can't queue at a closed station.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    edited September 2021
    MaxPB said:



    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.

    As an economist (well that's my degree as it was 10 hours a week with little outside reading) the above.

    In the ideal world you want high wages at the bottom of the market but you also ideally you don't want high house prices (house prices are a sink on economic output as they just increase the rent that needs to be recovered through prices elsewhere). The reason I live where I do is that I love having disposable income but I also don't need to care about working that much.

    The UK problems come from 3 particular issues

    1) no one switched our benefits system from needs based to contribution based
    2) the government didn't have the means the rest of europe has to restrict immigration (try getting a job in Holland without decent Dutch even though the only time they speak Dutch will be at the interview).
    3) cheap imported labour has discouraged investment in productivity enhancements. Go to a building site in France and even the smallest will have a crane and other time saving devices. Here it's all manual work with wheelbarrows still.
  • Cicero said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ
    So you're repeating the lie? Have you no integrity?

    If he said that as part of Vote Leave (he did not) then on what date did he say it?
    Look Philip, You´ve been caught out. The evidence is clear. You can keep spinning or accept that you are embarassing yourself.
    The evidence is clear, he didn't say it. A known liar fabricated that video and put a false caption on it and was called out on the BBC for lying.

    But its good to see you have no integrity. If you honestly think Daniel Hannan as part of Vote Leave as captioned said those words during the Referendum then please quote on what date he said it so the full thing can be seen in context.

    But you can't. As it is a lie. That video is a bullshit fabrication.
    Wait a minute, are you saying that Hannon did not say 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market’ in the face of a video of him saying 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market’?
    Yes I am absolutely saying that Hannan from Vote Leave did not say 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market' in the face of a doctored video of him saying that.
    Come off it - Hannon and the rest absolutely thought we could negotiate Single Market membership without all the other horrible EU stuff. It was intrinsic to their 'We Hold All the Cards' mentality. I doubt it was ever possible, but Boris bungled it if it was.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709


    Tory lead with YouGov up to seven points on eve of Labour conference

    CON 39 (n/c)
    LAB 32 (-3)
    LD 10 (+3)
    GREEN 9 (+2)
    REF UK 3 (n/c)

    Number of Con-Lab switchers halved since Labour lead a fortnight ago, fewer 2019 Tories don't know

    One in five Lab voters backing other parties

    In this crisis labour's polling must be of great concern to their supporters

    The question is why

    And on the fuel shortages, as has been commented on here, a few filling stations closed will not impact on the public

    It would have to be widespread across the country and causing huge queues

    There is a bigger swing from Labour to Green since 2019 than Labour to Tory it seems.

    On that poll Boris would be re elected with a Tory majority, albeit slightly smaller than in 2019
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,480
    edited September 2021


    Tory lead with YouGov up to seven points on eve of Labour conference

    CON 39 (n/c)
    LAB 32 (-3)
    LD 10 (+3)
    GREEN 9 (+2)
    REF UK 3 (n/c)

    Number of Con-Lab switchers halved since Labour lead a fortnight ago, fewer 2019 Tories don't know

    One in five Lab voters backing other parties

    In this crisis labour's polling must be of great concern to their supporters

    The question is why

    And on the fuel shortages, as has been commented on here, a few filling stations closed will not impact on the public

    It would have to be widespread across the country and causing huge queues

    The Greens, and even the Liberal Democrats, gaining at Labour's expense ; this always seems to happen when he makes a big play of taking on the left, without the corresponding rise so far among tory switchers, or soft-right voters, that he might have expected in the 1990s. As mentioned, he needs a much wider and more current range of advisors.
  • algarkirk said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    It is a fair question and why capitals
    The 'lump of labour fallacy' is a fallacy but does not suspend other economic laws, such as price, supply and demand

    It’s literally about price, supply and demand.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    edited September 2021

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    It is a fair question and why capitals
    It’s a false statement. See above for what actually happened when Britain imported EU migrants.
    Yes what happened is that house prices rose faster than wages.

    In 2003 before the EU expanded and immigration surged house price to earnings ratio was 4.33

    After that it surged as you'd expect when you have a surging demand but constrained supply.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding* that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation from the data.

    *with one or two exceptions, and with a noted bias toward higher income groups.
    That "overall" deserves some kind of platinum award for weaseldom.
  • IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding* that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation from the data.

    *with one or two exceptions, and with a noted bias toward higher income groups.
    That "overall" deserves some kind of platinum award for weaseldom.
    Overall if you were a wealthy landlord looking to let out multiple properties to all the people who you could cram into them then it was absolutely fantastic. If you wanted a cheap nanny and other cheap labour, it was even better.

    Overall if you were working for a living and renting and competing with others to get a pay rise and get on the property ladder then the facts and figures show that you were struggling.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709


    Tory lead with YouGov up to seven points on eve of Labour conference

    CON 39 (n/c)
    LAB 32 (-3)
    LD 10 (+3)
    GREEN 9 (+2)
    REF UK 3 (n/c)

    Number of Con-Lab switchers halved since Labour lead a fortnight ago, fewer 2019 Tories don't know

    One in five Lab voters backing other parties

    In this crisis labour's polling must be of great concern to their supporters

    The question is why

    And on the fuel shortages, as has been commented on here, a few filling stations closed will not impact on the public

    It would have to be widespread across the country and causing huge queues

    The Green's gaining at Labour's expense - this always happens when he makes a big play of taking on the left, without the corresponding rise among tory voters that he might have expected in the 1990's. As mentioned, he needs a much wider and more current range of advisors.
    Under FPTP a vote for the Greens outside Brighton Pavilion is effectively a vote for a Tory MP, so literally one could say 'Vote Green, Go Blue!'
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620
    eek said:

    MaxPB said:



    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.

    As an economist (well that's my degree as it was 10 hours a week with little outside reading) the above.

    In the ideal world you want high wages at the bottom of the market but you also ideally you don't want high house prices (house prices are a sink on economic output as they just increase the rent that needs to be recovered through prices elsewhere). The reason I live where I do is that I love having disposable income but I also don't need to care about working that much.

    The UK problems come from 3 particular issues

    1) no one switched our benefits system from needs based to contribution based
    2) the government didn't have the means the rest of europe has to restrict immigration (try getting a job in Holland without decent Dutch even though the only time they speak Dutch will be at the interview).
    3) cheap imported labour has discouraged investment in productivity enhancements. Go to a building site in France and even the smallest will have a crane and other time saving devices. Here it's all manual work with wheelbarrows still.
    Yes on all of that.

    Interestingly, when I advocated UBI a while back, the response from lefty people was often that they didn't like the idea that it would have to be contribution based and unavailable to immigrants.
  • algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    It is a fair question and why capitals
    It’s a false statement. See above for what actually happened when Britain imported EU migrants.
    Yes what happened is that house prices rose faster than wages.

    In 2003 before the EU expanded and immigration surged house price to earnings ratio was 4.33

    After that it surged as you'd expect when you have a surging demand but constrained supply.
    We were talking about wages.
    But you’re probably wrong about house prices too.

    See the literature for more details.
  • Cicero said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ
    So you're repeating the lie? Have you no integrity?

    If he said that as part of Vote Leave (he did not) then on what date did he say it?
    Look Philip, You´ve been caught out. The evidence is clear. You can keep spinning or accept that you are embarassing yourself.
    The evidence is clear, he didn't say it. A known liar fabricated that video and put a false caption on it and was called out on the BBC for lying.

    But its good to see you have no integrity. If you honestly think Daniel Hannan as part of Vote Leave as captioned said those words during the Referendum then please quote on what date he said it so the full thing can be seen in context.

    But you can't. As it is a lie. That video is a bullshit fabrication.
    Wait a minute, are you saying that Hannon did not say 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market’ in the face of a video of him saying 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market’?
    Yes I am absolutely saying that Hannan from Vote Leave did not say 'Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the Single Market' in the face of a doctored video of him saying that.
    Come off it - Hannon and the rest absolutely thought we could negotiate Single Market membership without all the other horrible EU stuff. It was intrinsic to their 'We Hold All the Cards' mentality. I doubt it was ever possible, but Boris bungled it if it was.
    We absolutely did hold all the cards and we got everything that Vote Leave proposed. We cherrypicked and got out of the Single Market but got a free trade agreement as suggested.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation.
    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.
    So what you’re saying is, you’ve had enough of facts, let’s go with the feel.

    I really need to add that to my Brexit matrix of excuses;

    (5) Claim that all human existence is essentially unknowable and that Brexit must be understood as beyond epistemology.
    There are no facts in economics, only opinions and then someone theory based on their opinion. Economics isn't a science.
    For applied economics there are so many factors it's impossible to identify which ones are really contributing.

    I also think of this Douglas Adams quote as it explains what happens

    There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.

    As as soon as you identify and start watching some factor you think contributes to XYZ something else becomes more significant.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,574
    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation.
    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.
    That will be the Switzerland whose deal with the EU Hannan assured us we'd duplicate ? :smile:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzykce4oxII&t=308s
  • algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    It is a fair question and why capitals
    It’s a false statement. See above for what actually happened when Britain imported EU migrants.
    Yes what happened is that house prices rose faster than wages.

    In 2003 before the EU expanded and immigration surged house price to earnings ratio was 4.33

    After that it surged as you'd expect when you have a surging demand but constrained supply.
    We were talking about wages.
    But you’re probably wrong about house prices too.

    See the literature for more details.
    Absolutely lets see all the literature you want.

    Lets compare the house price to earnings ratio in 2003 with after expansion. You tell me if it got better or worse. Hint: A lower ratio is better for the people we're talking about.
  • IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding* that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation from the data.

    *with one or two exceptions, and with a noted bias toward higher income groups.
    That "overall" deserves some kind of platinum award for weaseldom.
    Because your anecdote is more accurate?
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620
    stodge said:

    Morning all :)

    In response to one or two random meanderings - local Government finance reform, good luck with that, the ultimate poisoned chalice. Arguably the main factor in the fall of Margaret Thatcher and if it can bring down the individual hailed by many as the most successful British PM since the war, think what it could do to those of lesser calibre.

    Inflation - another trip down memory lane. I suppose if inflation is 3% and your savings are getting 0.25% you'll not be dancing in the streets. If your mortgage rate is 0.25% you will be dancing in the street. At some point, interest rates are going to have to rise in response to other economic factors - the methadone of QE will wear off one day.

    Had a look at the passenger transport numbers - it seems the Underground has settled to a new normal of just over half of pre-Covid levels during the week and two thirds (or slightly higher) at the weekend. The trains have picked up with passenger numbers now 60-62% of pre-Covid numbers having been as high as 68% in that first full week of September when everybody was optimistically, with a song in their heart and a spring in their step, marching back to their long-forgotten desks (apparently).

    I went through Waterloo on Tuesday - certainly signs of more passengers coming off the commuter trains but nowhere near the human stampede of pre-Covid times. The evening "rush" which used to see the concourse thronged with passengers trying to get home, is nothing like it was either.

    Certainly plenty of light commercial traffic out there (114% of pre-Covid). Does this explain our driver shortage issues? It may be one part of it - last Sunday 134% of pre-Covid light commercial traffic and 135% of HGVs. Our overheating post-Covid economy requires to be fed and watered - there are plenty of lorries on the road but clearly not enough to satisfy our voracious appetite for whatever it is we suddenly want but didn't have for 16 months.

    On the last part - it is my understanding that a boom in deliveries of all kinds is partially responsible for the HGV shortage. Drivers found they could make more money, have better working conditions and go home to their own beds, working in short range delivery in smaller vehicles.
  • algarkirk said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    It is a fair question and why capitals
    The 'lump of labour fallacy' is a fallacy but does not suspend other economic laws, such as price, supply and demand

    It’s literally about price, supply and demand.
    The fallacy is simply the idea that there is a fixed amount of work to be done. It doesn't really tell you anything about the distribution effects of immigration.
  • Nigelb said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation.
    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.
    That will be the Switzerland whose deal with the EU Hannan assured us we'd duplicate ? :smile:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzykce4oxII&t=308s
    We have a Swiss style deal now. An even better and improved one to suit Britain, but it is Swiss style.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797

    eek said:

    MaxPB said:



    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.

    As an economist (well that's my degree as it was 10 hours a week with little outside reading) the above.

    In the ideal world you want high wages at the bottom of the market but you also ideally you don't want high house prices (house prices are a sink on economic output as they just increase the rent that needs to be recovered through prices elsewhere). The reason I live where I do is that I love having disposable income but I also don't need to care about working that much.

    The UK problems come from 3 particular issues

    1) no one switched our benefits system from needs based to contribution based
    2) the government didn't have the means the rest of europe has to restrict immigration (try getting a job in Holland without decent Dutch even though the only time they speak Dutch will be at the interview).
    3) cheap imported labour has discouraged investment in productivity enhancements. Go to a building site in France and even the smallest will have a crane and other time saving devices. Here it's all manual work with wheelbarrows still.
    Yes on all of that.

    Interestingly, when I advocated UBI a while back, the response from lefty people was often that they didn't like the idea that it would have to be contribution based and unavailable to immigrants.
    Contribution based goes rather against the basis of UBI which is designed to be universal.

    But the problem is without a contribution based trigger welfare payments do seem to encourage the immigration of less economically valuable people...
  • Scotland, leading the world in truck naming.


  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation.
    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.
    Economics isn't really a hard science but econometric techniques, if applied properly, can yield useful insights. Simply dismissing their arguments because you disagree with their findings just makes you look silly.
    Plenty of economists do work in finance of course, and some of them are doing quite well out of it (cough). It's by no means the bad ones who stay in academia either. If anything it's a profession where wages tend to be inversely related to talent at the top, in my experience, because the best economists tend to gravitate towards academia and research careers.
    I don't disagree with any of that and I'm not dismissing the idea of the lump of labour fallacy, in fact I think it's probably correct and it's also why I think trade deals are a net good. My issue has always been the blind spot from academics who overwhelmingly support unlimited immigration on wages at the bottom of the market. Wages for people like me going up by 20% *may* create a trickle down effect to raise wages at the bottom, the evidence is not particularly clear on that, but we do know that people like me do well in a high immigration environment and wages at the top rising quickly does also result in higher overall GDP and better overall productivity. Those are probably close to fact.

    However, and there obviously is one, you can't simply apply the same theory to the bottom of the market where investment in productivity is low, the supply of labour is high and the barrier to entry non-existent. The market is totally different and it's increasingly obvious that the gains from EU immigration were made at the top (people like us) and those people at the bottom saw years of wage stagnation. That we're now seeing record wage inflation at the bottom does rather prove that quite emphatically. What I'm not saying and haven't said is that this will result to any increase in GDP, personally I don't think it will, it may lead to an overall reduction in GDP and maybe even GDP per capita.

    My main point is that I don't think GDP or GDP per capita is a particular valuable or important statistic, I'd rather have a lower GDP with the national income properly distributed than a very high one with the top 5% of people having an economic share of 40% and the bottom 20% of people having just 5% or whatever income inequality is at the moment. If it means I have to pay more for my coffee or my restaurant bill goes up a bit then that's probably worth it for people who serve me my coffee and bring the food to my table to earn a proper living wage.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    edited September 2021
    IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding* that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation from the data.

    *with one or two exceptions, and with a noted bias toward higher income groups.
    That "overall" deserves some kind of platinum award for weaseldom.
    What you miss is that the one or two exceptions meant low paid native workers (but they don't matter as the people writing the report hadn't seen them since they left school at 16 and went to the local pit / factory).
  • stodgestodge Posts: 12,741


    On the last part - it is my understanding that a boom in deliveries of all kinds is partially responsible for the HGV shortage. Drivers found they could make more money, have better working conditions and go home to their own beds, working in short range delivery in smaller vehicles.

    I can see that - another facet of the "new normal". Much more home delivery meaning more vans and more drivers to deliver to the home-based workers.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620
    eek said:

    eek said:

    MaxPB said:



    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.

    As an economist (well that's my degree as it was 10 hours a week with little outside reading) the above.

    In the ideal world you want high wages at the bottom of the market but you also ideally you don't want high house prices (house prices are a sink on economic output as they just increase the rent that needs to be recovered through prices elsewhere). The reason I live where I do is that I love having disposable income but I also don't need to care about working that much.

    The UK problems come from 3 particular issues

    1) no one switched our benefits system from needs based to contribution based
    2) the government didn't have the means the rest of europe has to restrict immigration (try getting a job in Holland without decent Dutch even though the only time they speak Dutch will be at the interview).
    3) cheap imported labour has discouraged investment in productivity enhancements. Go to a building site in France and even the smallest will have a crane and other time saving devices. Here it's all manual work with wheelbarrows still.
    Yes on all of that.

    Interestingly, when I advocated UBI a while back, the response from lefty people was often that they didn't like the idea that it would have to be contribution based and unavailable to immigrants.
    Contribution based goes rather against the basis of UBI which is designed to be universal.

    But the problem is without a contribution based trigger welfare payments do seem to encourage the immigration of less economically valuable people...
    Well yes - if you introduced a UBI for all, without UK citizenship etc, then it is painfully obvious that the entire world would turn up. Probably before lunch.
  • eek said:

    eek said:

    MaxPB said:



    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.

    As an economist (well that's my degree as it was 10 hours a week with little outside reading) the above.

    In the ideal world you want high wages at the bottom of the market but you also ideally you don't want high house prices (house prices are a sink on economic output as they just increase the rent that needs to be recovered through prices elsewhere). The reason I live where I do is that I love having disposable income but I also don't need to care about working that much.

    The UK problems come from 3 particular issues

    1) no one switched our benefits system from needs based to contribution based
    2) the government didn't have the means the rest of europe has to restrict immigration (try getting a job in Holland without decent Dutch even though the only time they speak Dutch will be at the interview).
    3) cheap imported labour has discouraged investment in productivity enhancements. Go to a building site in France and even the smallest will have a crane and other time saving devices. Here it's all manual work with wheelbarrows still.
    Yes on all of that.

    Interestingly, when I advocated UBI a while back, the response from lefty people was often that they didn't like the idea that it would have to be contribution based and unavailable to immigrants.
    Contribution based goes rather against the basis of UBI which is designed to be universal.

    But the problem is without a contribution based trigger welfare payments do seem to encourage the immigration of less economically valuable people...
    Well yes - if you introduced a UBI for all, without UK citizenship etc, then it is painfully obvious that the entire world would turn up. Probably before lunch.
    Just have the UBI for all citizens.

    If anyone else wants to come here they can do, but they'd need to work for years and support themselves for years and in a few years time they can claim citizenship and at that point they get the UBI.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603
    Nigelb said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation.
    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.
    That will be the Switzerland whose deal with the EU Hannan assured us we'd duplicate ? :smile:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzykce4oxII&t=308s
    Aiui the Swiss are very jealous of our deal. No free movement, no tariffs, they already have the customs infrastructure and we have freedom to disengage from the bits we don't like with a arbitration led settlement.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620

    algarkirk said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    It is a fair question and why capitals
    The 'lump of labour fallacy' is a fallacy but does not suspend other economic laws, such as price, supply and demand

    It’s literally about price, supply and demand.
    The fallacy is simply the idea that there is a fixed amount of work to be done. It doesn't really tell you anything about the distribution effects of immigration.
    Yup. So the amount of work might well increase, as wages are reduced. But then, either the excess of labour would get used up (no more workers) and wages would increase in the larger pool or continued immigration would keep filling the labour pool and keep the lower wages.

    It seems that the later is what happened in recent times.
  • MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding* that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation from the data.

    *with one or two exceptions, and with a noted bias toward higher income groups.
    I think you keep using phrases like LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY and fancy words like "econometricians" to support your pre-existing beliefs which you don't have whole-hearted confidence in.

    You had no answer to my question yesterday when I put it you that either: (a) a lack of EU free movement is pushing up wages due to labour shortages, or, (b) EU free movement had no effect on wages, except to benefit them, when we had all the labour we needed.

    They can't both be true. So which is it?
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    eek said:

    eek said:

    MaxPB said:



    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.

    As an economist (well that's my degree as it was 10 hours a week with little outside reading) the above.

    In the ideal world you want high wages at the bottom of the market but you also ideally you don't want high house prices (house prices are a sink on economic output as they just increase the rent that needs to be recovered through prices elsewhere). The reason I live where I do is that I love having disposable income but I also don't need to care about working that much.

    The UK problems come from 3 particular issues

    1) no one switched our benefits system from needs based to contribution based
    2) the government didn't have the means the rest of europe has to restrict immigration (try getting a job in Holland without decent Dutch even though the only time they speak Dutch will be at the interview).
    3) cheap imported labour has discouraged investment in productivity enhancements. Go to a building site in France and even the smallest will have a crane and other time saving devices. Here it's all manual work with wheelbarrows still.
    Yes on all of that.

    Interestingly, when I advocated UBI a while back, the response from lefty people was often that they didn't like the idea that it would have to be contribution based and unavailable to immigrants.
    Contribution based goes rather against the basis of UBI which is designed to be universal.

    But the problem is without a contribution based trigger welfare payments do seem to encourage the immigration of less economically valuable people...
    JSA is now contribution based via NI, you have to have made enough NI payments to get it.

    UC is non contribution based but no reason you cannot get more JSA if you have paid more in in NI.

    UBI is too expensive for the moment unless mass automation leads to mass unemployment and most people only on short term contracts on low wages, in which case it would be inevitable and funded by a robot tax
  • algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    It is a fair question and why capitals
    Because he harbours a secret fear he might be wrong and thinks this is a killer point.
  • MaxPB said:

    Nigelb said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation.
    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.
    That will be the Switzerland whose deal with the EU Hannan assured us we'd duplicate ? :smile:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzykce4oxII&t=308s
    Aiui the Swiss are very jealous of our deal. No free movement, no tariffs, they already have the customs infrastructure and we have freedom to disengage from the bits we don't like with a arbitration led settlement.
    Indeed plus its noteworthy that the Swiss junked their EU agreement they were about to sign after ours was signed.

    And in Norway they've just had a record vote share for Euroceptics there too I believe.

    Sceptics across the continent are capable of seeing what a good deal the UK got and are wondering if they can get the same.
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    IshmaelZ said:

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding* that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation from the data.

    *with one or two exceptions, and with a noted bias toward higher income groups.
    That "overall" deserves some kind of platinum award for weaseldom.
    Because your anecdote is more accurate?
    No, because if you are going to start giving it large about econometricians and data, you owe us the courtesy of a modicum of precision. Let me guess, there's one or more arithmetic means lurking in that "overall." That gives rise to the possibility that a few people are doing very well and a lot of people are doing very badly. In that case, why in principle should the overall position affect our approach and how in practice is it going to, in a OMOV set up?

    You mustn't get hung up on the data/anecdote thing, it's of much less applicability than you think outside the sphere of medical science, it does a lot of damage even there, and much argumentation depends on neither the one, nor the other.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation.
    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.
    So what you’re saying is, you’ve had enough of facts, let’s go with the feel.

    I really need to add that to my Brexit matrix of excuses;

    (5) Claim that all human existence is essentially unknowable and that Brexit must be understood as beyond epistemology.
    There are no facts in economics, only opinions and then someone theory based on their opinion. Economics isn't a science.
    How’s that policy to ban all residential property rentals going for you? Thought it through a bit yet?
    Hold on, I never said to ban it, I've always said to make it less profitable and reduce the number of landlords and push the existing ones into the same market as housing associations. Don't put words in my mouth.
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 21,723
    Tesco offering drivers a £1,000 sign on to come to work for them

    Small print applies ie half after 3 months half after 6 months

    My step son says his mate drives for Tesco, £21.40 an hour, the problem he says is not the drivers, they can’t get the cheap Labour on minimum wage to work night shifts loading the lorries.

    "What self respecting person would work nights for minimum wage"
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797

    algarkirk said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    It is a fair question and why capitals
    The 'lump of labour fallacy' is a fallacy but does not suspend other economic laws, such as price, supply and demand

    It’s literally about price, supply and demand.
    The fallacy is simply the idea that there is a fixed amount of work to be done. It doesn't really tell you anything about the distribution effects of immigration.
    Yup. So the amount of work might well increase, as wages are reduced. But then, either the excess of labour would get used up (no more workers) and wages would increase in the larger pool or continued immigration would keep filling the labour pool and keep the lower wages.

    It seems that the later is what happened in recent times.
    The latter is what has been happening and was obvious as you saw more and more jobs get pulled into the minimum wage as the minimum wage was increased.

    What should happen is that as the minimum wage increased, other wages would rise to reflect the higher minimum wage while retaining the differential pay for skillset / responsibility. And it never happened.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620
    stodge said:


    On the last part - it is my understanding that a boom in deliveries of all kinds is partially responsible for the HGV shortage. Drivers found they could make more money, have better working conditions and go home to their own beds, working in short range delivery in smaller vehicles.

    I can see that - another facet of the "new normal". Much more home delivery meaning more vans and more drivers to deliver to the home-based workers.
    A relative runs a business doing just in time delivery of supplies in London. He has seen that a number of couriers have collapsed/vanished - the shitty ones offering lowest pay and the most screw-the-driver conditions.

    Addison Lee (the delivery side of the business*) seem to be going strong - the drivers seem happy with them, for a number of reasons. Apparently their dispatching is effective and the drivers get joined up thinking on where their next job is relative to the last.....

    *Vans not cabs.
  • tlg86tlg86 Posts: 25,165
    edited September 2021
    I think it's fairly obvious that a lot of immigration from Europe has generated new economic activity. But the problem is that those people need to live somewhere and that's contributed to the high cost of housing. That's why Brexit happened.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620

    Tesco offering drivers a £1,000 sign on to come to work for them

    Small print applies ie half after 3 months half after 6 months

    My step son says his mate drives for Tesco, £21.40 an hour, the problem he says is not the drivers, they can’t get the cheap Labour on minimum wage to work night shifts loading the lorries.

    "What self respecting person would work nights for minimum wage"

    back when the dinosaurs roamed and I was young, nights was time-and-a-half or often double-time. Same with working in pubs on the weekend.
  • TimSTimS Posts: 9,160


    Tory lead with YouGov up to seven points on eve of Labour conference

    CON 39 (n/c)
    LAB 32 (-3)
    LD 10 (+3)
    GREEN 9 (+2)
    REF UK 3 (n/c)

    Number of Con-Lab switchers halved since Labour lead a fortnight ago, fewer 2019 Tories don't know

    One in five Lab voters backing other parties

    In this crisis labour's polling must be of great concern to their supporters

    The question is why

    And on the fuel shortages, as has been commented on here, a few filling stations closed will not impact on the public

    It would have to be widespread across the country and causing huge queues

    The Greens, and even the Liberal Democrats, gaining at Labour's expense ; this always seems to happen when he makes a big play of taking on the left, without the corresponding rise so far among tory switchers, or soft-right voters, that he might have expected in the 1990s. As mentioned, he needs a much wider and more current range of advisors.
    It’s not a good poll for Labour, but not is it good for the Tories. Their absolute support is below 40%, so they would need to rely on splitting the anti-Tory vote to succeed.

    There is 51% of voters for the left of centre to target there (in reality probably a bit less as a few Lib Dems would vote conservative over Labour). Come an election the greens will fall back to max 3% with the vast majority of the rest either going red or to abstention and a little bit to Yellow. The efficiency of the rest then depends on LD-Labour tactical voting.

    Then of course there’s the SNP which is essentially a block vote taking up the remaining 4-5%, like the NI parties, and unlikely to swing much one way or the other.

    But overall that’s a material swing away from the government compared with 2019, and with an opposition leader who’ll be much less scary to Lib Dem inclined Home Counties remain voters.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    It is a fair question and why capitals
    Because he harbours a secret fear he might be wrong and thinks this is a killer point.
    Yup, rapidly rising wages for the bottom 20% of earners is literally the killer point for Brexit and justifies it in totality. No one can be against the working poor getting a 10-20% pay increase.
  • Stark_DawningStark_Dawning Posts: 9,232
    edited September 2021

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding* that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation from the data.

    *with one or two exceptions, and with a noted bias toward higher income groups.
    I think you keep using phrases like LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY and fancy words like "econometricians" to support your pre-existing beliefs which you don't have whole-hearted confidence in.

    You had no answer to my question yesterday when I put it you that either: (a) a lack of EU free movement is pushing up wages due to labour shortages, or, (b) EU free movement had no effect on wages, except to benefit them, when we had all the labour we needed.

    They can't both be true. So which is it?
    Wage increases arising from a successful business in a benign environment, and wage increases necessitated by soaring costs are very different things.
  • Tesco offering drivers a £1,000 sign on to come to work for them

    Small print applies ie half after 3 months half after 6 months

    My step son says his mate drives for Tesco, £21.40 an hour, the problem he says is not the drivers, they can’t get the cheap Labour on minimum wage to work night shifts loading the lorries.

    "What self respecting person would work nights for minimum wage"

    When the minimum wage first came in it was typically the minimum wage for those jobs in weekday daytimes. Work weekends (especially Sundays) or work nights and there was a pay premium for working those unsocial hours.

    I wonder why that ceased to be the case? And why people are suddenly struggling to fill vacancies in unsocial hours now?

    Its an unexplained mystery to some isn't it?
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620
    eek said:

    algarkirk said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    It is a fair question and why capitals
    The 'lump of labour fallacy' is a fallacy but does not suspend other economic laws, such as price, supply and demand

    It’s literally about price, supply and demand.
    The fallacy is simply the idea that there is a fixed amount of work to be done. It doesn't really tell you anything about the distribution effects of immigration.
    Yup. So the amount of work might well increase, as wages are reduced. But then, either the excess of labour would get used up (no more workers) and wages would increase in the larger pool or continued immigration would keep filling the labour pool and keep the lower wages.

    It seems that the later is what happened in recent times.
    The latter is what has been happening and was obvious as you saw more and more jobs get pulled into the minimum wage as the minimum wage was increased.

    What should happen is that as the minimum wage increased, other wages would rise to reflect the higher minimum wage while retaining the differential pay for skillset / responsibility. And it never happened.
    Differentials got squeezed, yes.
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 21,723

    Any SKS fans explain why Lab are on 32 in latest YG

    Thanks in advance

    30 mins and counting

    Come on SKS fans

    Surely RP could at least say but Corbyn Trot Trot Trot
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    edited September 2021

    Tesco offering drivers a £1,000 sign on to come to work for them

    Small print applies ie half after 3 months half after 6 months

    My step son says his mate drives for Tesco, £21.40 an hour, the problem he says is not the drivers, they can’t get the cheap Labour on minimum wage to work night shifts loading the lorries.

    "What self respecting person would work nights for minimum wage"

    back when the dinosaurs roamed and I was young, nights was time-and-a-half or often double-time. Same with working in pubs on the weekend.
    Yep - the ever increasing supply of cheap imported labour pulled more and more things into the minimum wage pay band.

    Between Brexit and Covid that's gone and a lot of jobs are going to need to pay more to encourage people.

    For reference Amazon's warehouse rates are £10 an hour day shift, £11.71 nightshift, £20 an hour for a 5th shift that week and a £1000 signing on bonus.

    From what I've heard the biggest impact that's had is on local visiting social care workers who have binned it for a hassle free life.
  • TheValiantTheValiant Posts: 1,678

    Selebian said:

    By your definition of a genuine Tory?* Or by the more mainstream definitin of someone who habitually votes Tory and/or is a Conservative Party member?

    *To be honest, I thought that was a group of 1 :wink: Surprised that Charles, MM and Sandpit make the cut.

    I'm your resident NCR supporter on PB.

    Don't see many of those around these days, but I do agree that Kimble is a crap President and needs to go........

    Wow I always thought your flag was the actual California!
    For the Republic!

    (Fallout 1, 2 and NV are the story of the west. I really do like the story of recovery of the west coast of the former United States - Fallout 3 and 4 are much more mewh....)
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620
    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    It is a fair question and why capitals
    Because he harbours a secret fear he might be wrong and thinks this is a killer point.
    Yup, rapidly rising wages for the bottom 20% of earners is literally the killer point for Brexit and justifies it in totality. No one can be against the working poor getting a 10-20% pay increase.
    I am.

    We need to reintroduce the act of 1515 which limits a labourers wage at 3d per day for winter months and 4d per day for summer months with bonuses to be paid at harvest time.

    Skilled workers can have 6d for summer days and 5d per day during the winter.
  • MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding* that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation from the data.

    *with one or two exceptions, and with a noted bias toward higher income groups.
    I think you keep using phrases like LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY and fancy words like "econometricians" to support your pre-existing beliefs which you don't have whole-hearted confidence in.

    You had no answer to my question yesterday when I put it you that either: (a) a lack of EU free movement is pushing up wages due to labour shortages, or, (b) EU free movement had no effect on wages, except to benefit them, when we had all the labour we needed.

    They can't both be true. So which is it?
    Wage increases arising from a successful business in a benign environment, and wage increases necessitated by soaring costs are very different things.
    And what we have today is wage increased from a successful business in a benign environment because we have full employment.

    Soaring costs is something we've had for decades which is why cost to earning ratios have shot up.
  • After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?

    https://twitter.com/Scott_Wortley/status/1441323652062932995?s=20
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830
    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    It is a fair question and why capitals
    Because he harbours a secret fear he might be wrong and thinks this is a killer point.
    Yup, rapidly rising wages for the bottom 20% of earners is literally the killer point for Brexit and justifies it in totality. No one can be against the working poor getting a 10-20% pay increase.
    Yes they can, if it leads to a 10-20% increase in the cost of goods and services. But what they can't do, is continue to insist that the working poor voted leave in a spirit of mere pigheaded xenophobia.
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603

    Tesco offering drivers a £1,000 sign on to come to work for them

    Small print applies ie half after 3 months half after 6 months

    My step son says his mate drives for Tesco, £21.40 an hour, the problem he says is not the drivers, they can’t get the cheap Labour on minimum wage to work night shifts loading the lorries.

    "What self respecting person would work nights for minimum wage"

    back when the dinosaurs roamed and I was young, nights was time-and-a-half or often double-time. Same with working in pubs on the weekend.
    Double pay on bank holidays! Triple time to work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day!

    I think most places still do it.
  • edmundintokyoedmundintokyo Posts: 17,136
    edited September 2021
    OT Chuck Grassley plans to stay in the Senate until he's 95:
    https://twitter.com/GrassleyWorks/status/1441326699593932805

    I don't generally like the House of Lords as an idea but having somewhere where politicians can go after they retire to drink and talk about politics and make speeches and continue to feel important seems like a useful way to make them let go. The UK shouldn't abolish the HoL, they should make it purely ceremonial like the Monarchy and just slot in a new thing underneath to do the actual work.
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797
    MaxPB said:

    Tesco offering drivers a £1,000 sign on to come to work for them

    Small print applies ie half after 3 months half after 6 months

    My step son says his mate drives for Tesco, £21.40 an hour, the problem he says is not the drivers, they can’t get the cheap Labour on minimum wage to work night shifts loading the lorries.

    "What self respecting person would work nights for minimum wage"

    back when the dinosaurs roamed and I was young, nights was time-and-a-half or often double-time. Same with working in pubs on the weekend.
    Double pay on bank holidays! Triple time to work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day!

    I think most places still do it.
    Most don't actually - they've shifted their T&Cs to being normal pay because until now there was always someone else willing to do the job.
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 21,723

    Tesco offering drivers a £1,000 sign on to come to work for them

    Small print applies ie half after 3 months half after 6 months

    My step son says his mate drives for Tesco, £21.40 an hour, the problem he says is not the drivers, they can’t get the cheap Labour on minimum wage to work night shifts loading the lorries.

    "What self respecting person would work nights for minimum wage"

    When the minimum wage first came in it was typically the minimum wage for those jobs in weekday daytimes. Work weekends (especially Sundays) or work nights and there was a pay premium for working those unsocial hours.

    I wonder why that ceased to be the case? And why people are suddenly struggling to fill vacancies in unsocial hours now?

    Its an unexplained mystery to some isn't it?
    Capitalists got greedier and greedier then it all imploded according to some book i once read
  • MaxPBMaxPB Posts: 37,603
    eek said:

    MaxPB said:

    Tesco offering drivers a £1,000 sign on to come to work for them

    Small print applies ie half after 3 months half after 6 months

    My step son says his mate drives for Tesco, £21.40 an hour, the problem he says is not the drivers, they can’t get the cheap Labour on minimum wage to work night shifts loading the lorries.

    "What self respecting person would work nights for minimum wage"

    back when the dinosaurs roamed and I was young, nights was time-and-a-half or often double-time. Same with working in pubs on the weekend.
    Double pay on bank holidays! Triple time to work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day!

    I think most places still do it.
    Most don't actually - they've shifted their T&Cs to being normal pay because until now there was always someone else willing to do the job.
    Wow, what idiot would work on a bank holiday without double time then?!
  • IshmaelZIshmaelZ Posts: 21,830

    After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?

    https://twitter.com/Scott_Wortley/status/1441323652062932995?s=20

    Laugh as much as you like, I'm the one with 80 litres of diesel in the tank and all Tavistock's remaining supplies of tonic water in the larder.
  • TomsToms Posts: 2,478
    The way we use cars is perverse and destructive.
    I seems you can lead a driver to logic, but you can't make him think.
  • MaxPB said:

    eek said:

    MaxPB said:

    Tesco offering drivers a £1,000 sign on to come to work for them

    Small print applies ie half after 3 months half after 6 months

    My step son says his mate drives for Tesco, £21.40 an hour, the problem he says is not the drivers, they can’t get the cheap Labour on minimum wage to work night shifts loading the lorries.

    "What self respecting person would work nights for minimum wage"

    back when the dinosaurs roamed and I was young, nights was time-and-a-half or often double-time. Same with working in pubs on the weekend.
    Double pay on bank holidays! Triple time to work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day!

    I think most places still do it.
    Most don't actually - they've shifted their T&Cs to being normal pay because until now there was always someone else willing to do the job.
    Wow, what idiot would work on a bank holiday without double time then?!
    To be fair a big change was when holiday leave got increased from 20 days to 28 days since the 28 includes the 8 bank holidays.

    If you take the 8 bank holidays off you lose your 8 days leave on those days. I've worked most bank holidays as a normal day almost all my career since I'd rather have those 8 days when I want them rather on some abitrary date somebody else chose for me.
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709

    OT Chuck Grassley plans to stay in the Senate until he's 95:
    https://twitter.com/GrassleyWorks/status/1441326699593932805

    I don't generally like the House of Lords as an idea but having somewhere where politicians can go after they retire to drink and talk about politics and make speeches and continue to feel important seems like a useful way to make them let go. The UK shouldn't abolish the HoL, they should make it purely ceremonial like the Monarchy and just slot in a new thing underneath to do the actual work.

    The Senate is basically the US equivalent of the House of Lords (the House of Representatives is the US equivalent of the House of Commons). The fact Senators are elected only ever 6 years means they tend to take a longer term view of legislation rather than short term political considerations like Representatives. Hence it is full of elder statesmen like the Lords is (McCain was a Senator until he died) and if the Lords was ever elected it should equally only be for longer terms of 6 years or more so its function as a revising chamber is not changed.
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,480
    edited September 2021
    TimS said:


    Tory lead with YouGov up to seven points on eve of Labour conference

    CON 39 (n/c)
    LAB 32 (-3)
    LD 10 (+3)
    GREEN 9 (+2)
    REF UK 3 (n/c)

    Number of Con-Lab switchers halved since Labour lead a fortnight ago, fewer 2019 Tories don't know

    One in five Lab voters backing other parties

    In this crisis labour's polling must be of great concern to their supporters

    The question is why

    And on the fuel shortages, as has been commented on here, a few filling stations closed will not impact on the public

    It would have to be widespread across the country and causing huge queues

    The Greens, and even the Liberal Democrats, gaining at Labour's expense ; this always seems to happen when he makes a big play of taking on the left, without the corresponding rise so far among tory switchers, or soft-right voters, that he might have expected in the 1990s. As mentioned, he needs a much wider and more current range of advisors.
    It’s not a good poll for Labour, but not is it good for the Tories. Their absolute support is below 40%, so they would need to rely on splitting the anti-Tory vote to succeed.

    There is 51% of voters for the left of centre to target there (in reality probably a bit less as a few Lib Dems would vote conservative over Labour). Come an election the greens will fall back to max 3% with the vast majority of the rest either going red or to abstention and a little bit to Yellow. The efficiency of the rest then depends on LD-Labour tactical voting.

    Then of course there’s the SNP which is essentially a block vote taking up the remaining 4-5%, like the NI parties, and unlikely to swing much one way or the other.

    But overall that’s a material swing away from the government compared with 2019, and with an opposition leader who’ll be much less scary to Lib Dem inclined Home Counties remain voters.
    As we've seen among some of those professional voters in recent elections, it may be the cultural changes afoot with some of these voters that are benefitting parties like the LD's and Greens so far, though, I think, rather than Starmer, in some of his current '90s tribute moments. My sense is that quite a few of the children is these soft-right Home Counties tories are cultural remainers, and culturally metropolitan.

    What can easy look like anti-democratic machinations against his party's left, or authoritarian and machine politics, may just push them to more pro-metropolitan or overtly pro-European parties, for instance, rather than impressing them in any way, however professionally or business-inclined they might happen to be.
  • MalmesburyMalmesbury Posts: 43,620
    MaxPB said:

    eek said:

    MaxPB said:

    Tesco offering drivers a £1,000 sign on to come to work for them

    Small print applies ie half after 3 months half after 6 months

    My step son says his mate drives for Tesco, £21.40 an hour, the problem he says is not the drivers, they can’t get the cheap Labour on minimum wage to work night shifts loading the lorries.

    "What self respecting person would work nights for minimum wage"

    back when the dinosaurs roamed and I was young, nights was time-and-a-half or often double-time. Same with working in pubs on the weekend.
    Double pay on bank holidays! Triple time to work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day!

    I think most places still do it.
    Most don't actually - they've shifted their T&Cs to being normal pay because until now there was always someone else willing to do the job.
    Wow, what idiot would work on a bank holiday without double time then?!
    Same people who used to queue in the street in Hammersmith, waiting for a van or a pickup truck to come by to offer them £50 cash-in-hand for a days work, maybe.

    You've never tasted desperate. as the Mob boss said....
  • IshmaelZ said:

    After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?

    https://twitter.com/Scott_Wortley/status/1441323652062932995?s=20

    Laugh as much as you like, I'm the one with 80 litres of diesel in the tank and all Tavistock's remaining supplies of tonic water in the larder.
    I know people love to get Trans issues into every debate but what does a sex change clinic need tonic water for? 😉
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 21,723
    IshmaelZ said:

    After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?

    https://twitter.com/Scott_Wortley/status/1441323652062932995?s=20

    Laugh as much as you like, I'm the one with 80 litres of diesel in the tank and all Tavistock's remaining supplies of tonic water in the larder.
    I can sell you an 18 month old toilet roll

    £1 a sheet
  • London: Britain’s Foreign Office has warned a British parliamentarian as well as a trio of prominent human rights campaigners against travelling to more than 50 countries that have extradition treaties with China after being named in a Hong Kong security case.

    Sources not free to talk on the record have confirmed to The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that Lord David Alton, who has been pushing Boris Johnson’s government to adopt a tougher China policy, was told by senior Foreign Office officials that he needed to consider the implications of travelling to third countries that could send them to China.


    https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/britain-warns-mp-activists-against-travel-to-50-countries-over-china-risk-20210924-p58udf.html
  • MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation.
    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.
    Economics isn't really a hard science but econometric techniques, if applied properly, can yield useful insights. Simply dismissing their arguments because you disagree with their findings just makes you look silly.
    Plenty of economists do work in finance of course, and some of them are doing quite well out of it (cough). It's by no means the bad ones who stay in academia either. If anything it's a profession where wages tend to be inversely related to talent at the top, in my experience, because the best economists tend to gravitate towards academia and research careers.
    I don't disagree with any of that and I'm not dismissing the idea of the lump of labour fallacy, in fact I think it's probably correct and it's also why I think trade deals are a net good. My issue has always been the blind spot from academics who overwhelmingly support unlimited immigration on wages at the bottom of the market. Wages for people like me going up by 20% *may* create a trickle down effect to raise wages at the bottom, the evidence is not particularly clear on that, but we do know that people like me do well in a high immigration environment and wages at the top rising quickly does also result in higher overall GDP and better overall productivity. Those are probably close to fact.

    However, and there obviously is one, you can't simply apply the same theory to the bottom of the market where investment in productivity is low, the supply of labour is high and the barrier to entry non-existent. The market is totally different and it's increasingly obvious that the gains from EU immigration were made at the top (people like us) and those people at the bottom saw years of wage stagnation. That we're now seeing record wage inflation at the bottom does rather prove that quite emphatically. What I'm not saying and haven't said is that this will result to any increase in GDP, personally I don't think it will, it may lead to an overall reduction in GDP and maybe even GDP per capita.

    My main point is that I don't think GDP or GDP per capita is a particular valuable or important statistic, I'd rather have a lower GDP with the national income properly distributed than a very high one with the top 5% of people having an economic share of 40% and the bottom 20% of people having just 5% or whatever income inequality is at the moment. If it means I have to pay more for my coffee or my restaurant bill goes up a bit then that's probably worth it for people who serve me my coffee and bring the food to my table to earn a proper living wage.
    I agree with all of that. I would like to see a lasting compression of incomes but I am sceptical that Brexit will deliver it, and I think there are plenty of other policy changes that could deliver it with less collateral damage to the economy and without reducing people's rights and opportunities as Brexit has. I am also sceptical of all this championing of the lower paid from the kind of people who would normally cross the road to piss on the working class.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,574
    edited September 2021
    HYUFD said:

    OT Chuck Grassley plans to stay in the Senate until he's 95:
    https://twitter.com/GrassleyWorks/status/1441326699593932805

    I don't generally like the House of Lords as an idea but having somewhere where politicians can go after they retire to drink and talk about politics and make speeches and continue to feel important seems like a useful way to make them let go. The UK shouldn't abolish the HoL, they should make it purely ceremonial like the Monarchy and just slot in a new thing underneath to do the actual work.

    The Senate is basically the US equivalent of the House of Lords (the House of Representatives is the US equivalent of the House of Commons). The fact Senators are elected only ever 6 years means they tend to take a longer term view of legislation rather than short term political considerations like Representatives. Hence it is full of elder statesmen like the Lords is (McCain was a Senator until he died) and if the Lords was ever elected it should equally only be for longer terms of 6 years or more so its function as a revising chamber is not changed.
    No, it really is not.
    It is an institution whose legislative functions alone are far more powerful than the HoL. The comparison is silly.
  • Philip_ThompsonPhilip_Thompson Posts: 65,826
    edited September 2021

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    MaxPB said:

    algarkirk said:

    Cicero said:

    TOPPING said:

    TOPPING said:

    DavidL said:

    Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.

    Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
    Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.

    There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
    5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make

    Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic

    It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
    We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.

    If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.

    "Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
    The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.

    32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.

    If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.

    So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!

    If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?

    If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.

    Necessity is the mother of invention.

    Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
    So why command and control immigration?
    I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.

    It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
    So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
    I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
    We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
    You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?

    We voted to leave the Single Market.
    No we did not. Hannon and many others explicitly said that voting to leave the EU DID NOT mean that we would leave the single market.

    They were wrong because Cúmmings and others had an agenda that if admitted at the time would have led to defeat for Leave.

    We will not let you people get away with lying about your lies.
    You are telling a lie.

    Hannon and others did not say that during the Referendum. That is a lie.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkof9CVerrQ

    That was 2015, though. So not during the referendum. Technically (if weaselly).

    The greater pathos is in what Dan Hannan wrote two days before the referendum;

    https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

    The United Kingdom now leads a 22-state bloc that forms a free trade area with the EU, but remains outside its political structures. For their part, the EU 24 have continued to push ahead with economic, military and political amalgamation. They now have a common police force and army, a pan-European income tax and a harmonised system of social security. These developments have prompted referendums in three other EU states on whether to copy Britain.
    Hannan’s fantasy was laughable.

    But a great source for deep psycho-analytic interpretation.

    There is a book to be written on the psychology and psychosis of Brexit.
    Maybe the issue is the psychology and psychosis of all people unable to see the merits of the other side's arguments, or are in denial about there being any.

    I would really like a PB fanbois to give me a "real" Brexit benefit, not just "sovereignty" crap as it doesn't pay any bills, and seems to restrict evrything we used to do.
    As has been discussed on here, rising wages across the UK is the best advert for Brexit

    No cheap labour from abroad undercutting wages and jobs
    Oh goody, inflation, leading to higher food and energy prices.
    Genuine question.

    Do you support importing cheap labour suppressing UK wages
    LUMP OF LABOUR FALLACY SIREN
    You hold a lot of store in that theory but it's just a theory based on the "science" of economics. Economics isn't an actual science and people who think it is usually think far too much of the field and themselves - see the likes of Krugman.
    Sorry, but your answer is total garbage.

    In any case, econometricians have looked time and time again at the impact of FOM and kept finding that overall it led to:

    Higher productivity.
    Higher skills across the board.
    Higher wages (for native workers)
    More products & services (for native consumers).

    It’s not just theory; it’s observation.
    Econometrics. Don't make me laugh. If those guys were actually any good they'd all have made millions in the city.

    Their framing is incorrect. They start with a goal of wanting all trade and all immigration to have value and then work backwards.

    The observation we have now is that the UK is seeing surging wages at the bottom of the market because low wage immigrants are now unable to come to the UK. What happens next is still up for debate, however, we know from countries like Switzerland which have very high barriers to entry at the bottom but none at the top it results in the whole nation being better off rather than just the few at the top who get cheaper services and better pay.

    You really should stop thinking of economics as a science. It isn't. Any economist who says it is and tries to dress it up with econometrics is a fool.
    Economics isn't really a hard science but econometric techniques, if applied properly, can yield useful insights. Simply dismissing their arguments because you disagree with their findings just makes you look silly.
    Plenty of economists do work in finance of course, and some of them are doing quite well out of it (cough). It's by no means the bad ones who stay in academia either. If anything it's a profession where wages tend to be inversely related to talent at the top, in my experience, because the best economists tend to gravitate towards academia and research careers.
    I don't disagree with any of that and I'm not dismissing the idea of the lump of labour fallacy, in fact I think it's probably correct and it's also why I think trade deals are a net good. My issue has always been the blind spot from academics who overwhelmingly support unlimited immigration on wages at the bottom of the market. Wages for people like me going up by 20% *may* create a trickle down effect to raise wages at the bottom, the evidence is not particularly clear on that, but we do know that people like me do well in a high immigration environment and wages at the top rising quickly does also result in higher overall GDP and better overall productivity. Those are probably close to fact.

    However, and there obviously is one, you can't simply apply the same theory to the bottom of the market where investment in productivity is low, the supply of labour is high and the barrier to entry non-existent. The market is totally different and it's increasingly obvious that the gains from EU immigration were made at the top (people like us) and those people at the bottom saw years of wage stagnation. That we're now seeing record wage inflation at the bottom does rather prove that quite emphatically. What I'm not saying and haven't said is that this will result to any increase in GDP, personally I don't think it will, it may lead to an overall reduction in GDP and maybe even GDP per capita.

    My main point is that I don't think GDP or GDP per capita is a particular valuable or important statistic, I'd rather have a lower GDP with the national income properly distributed than a very high one with the top 5% of people having an economic share of 40% and the bottom 20% of people having just 5% or whatever income inequality is at the moment. If it means I have to pay more for my coffee or my restaurant bill goes up a bit then that's probably worth it for people who serve me my coffee and bring the food to my table to earn a proper living wage.
    I agree with all of that. I would like to see a lasting compression of incomes but I am sceptical that Brexit will deliver it, and I think there are plenty of other policy changes that could deliver it with less collateral damage to the economy and without reducing people's rights and opportunities as Brexit has. I am also sceptical of all this championing of the lower paid from the kind of people who would normally cross the road to piss on the working class.
    That's not fair. Most of us (very few exceptions) genuinely want to see the working class do well.

    The difference is in how we think that should be achieved.

    For instance I have long argued we should lower real tax rates on the poorest in society instead of relying upon tax and redistribution. Now for people who believe in redistribution as the solution that may sound like piss, but it isn't.

    Its the old 'teach a man to fish' analogy. Those who advocate 'teaching a man to fish' aren't advocating pushing him in the water and letting him drown or starve.
  • WhisperingOracleWhisperingOracle Posts: 8,480
    edited September 2021
    The children *of * the soft-right and Home Counties tories now being cultural remainers, that should say below.
  • SelebianSelebian Posts: 7,257
    edited September 2021

    IshmaelZ said:

    After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?

    https://twitter.com/Scott_Wortley/status/1441323652062932995?s=20

    Laugh as much as you like, I'm the one with 80 litres of diesel in the tank and all Tavistock's remaining supplies of tonic water in the larder.
    I know people love to get Trans issues into every debate but what does a sex change clinic need tonic water for? 😉
    We have some weird shared sense of humour, as I was just writing something about checking it for puberty-blocking hormones...

    (see also the poker sucker joke from the other day)

    Starting to wonder whether we've got some Dr Jekyll (Follow Back Pro European)/Mr Hyde (Full Brexit Prompt Exit) thing going on...
  • Anybody reading this thread would be tempted to think that in the olden days, before the EU, FOM and imported labour, British employers paid the working class generous wages that have only been undercut since we joined the EU (and then later when we imported workers from the accession countries). It's laughable - low wages have always been at the forefront of British capitalism, and it was only in the heavily unionised sectors that manual workers could bargain for higher wages. Why do people think London Transport and others were so keen on the Windrush immigrants? I suspect that the decline of the power of trades unions has more to do with the low wages in many sectors than imported labour.

    Anyway, it's great to see so many Tories now advocating higher wages for the working class. At least something we can all agree on.
  • Interesting poll on Starmer and much my view of him

    https://twitter.com/OpiniumResearch/status/1441346885411741699?s=19
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    Nigelb said:

    HYUFD said:

    OT Chuck Grassley plans to stay in the Senate until he's 95:
    https://twitter.com/GrassleyWorks/status/1441326699593932805

    I don't generally like the House of Lords as an idea but having somewhere where politicians can go after they retire to drink and talk about politics and make speeches and continue to feel important seems like a useful way to make them let go. The UK shouldn't abolish the HoL, they should make it purely ceremonial like the Monarchy and just slot in a new thing underneath to do the actual work.

    The Senate is basically the US equivalent of the House of Lords (the House of Representatives is the US equivalent of the House of Commons). The fact Senators are elected only ever 6 years means they tend to take a longer term view of legislation rather than short term political considerations like Representatives. Hence it is full of elder statesmen like the Lords is (McCain was a Senator until he died) and if the Lords was ever elected it should equally only be for longer terms of 6 years or more so its function as a revising chamber is not changed.
    No, it really is not.
    It is an institution whose legislative functions alone are far more powerful than the HoL. The comparison is silly.
    In terms of domestic policy most policy originates from the House of Representatives and all finance and revenue bills do, often proposed by the President too if of the same party. The Senate may need to agree to legislation too but so did the Lords until the Parliament Act last century, now the Lords is mainly a delaying body which is where the main difference is.

    The only distinctive powers the Senate has are approval of foreign treaties and approval of key posts within the Cabinet and Federal government and judiciary

  • After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?

    https://twitter.com/Scott_Wortley/status/1441323652062932995?s=20

    Is there any sovereignty left? I need to stock up.
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 21,723

    MaxPB said:

    eek said:

    MaxPB said:

    Tesco offering drivers a £1,000 sign on to come to work for them

    Small print applies ie half after 3 months half after 6 months

    My step son says his mate drives for Tesco, £21.40 an hour, the problem he says is not the drivers, they can’t get the cheap Labour on minimum wage to work night shifts loading the lorries.

    "What self respecting person would work nights for minimum wage"

    back when the dinosaurs roamed and I was young, nights was time-and-a-half or often double-time. Same with working in pubs on the weekend.
    Double pay on bank holidays! Triple time to work Christmas Eve and Christmas Day!

    I think most places still do it.
    Most don't actually - they've shifted their T&Cs to being normal pay because until now there was always someone else willing to do the job.
    Wow, what idiot would work on a bank holiday without double time then?!
    To be fair a big change was when holiday leave got increased from 20 days to 28 days since the 28 includes the 8 bank holidays.

    If you take the 8 bank holidays off you lose your 8 days leave on those days. I've worked most bank holidays as a normal day almost all my career since I'd rather have those 8 days when I want them rather on some abitrary date somebody else chose for me.
    My holiday leave entitlement increased to 365 days PA since the age of 54 thanks to good planning between the afe of 22 and 53

    And of course Nigel for England funding my pension
  • Sean_FSean_F Posts: 35,765



    I agree with all of that. I would like to see a lasting compression of incomes but I am sceptical that Brexit will deliver it, and I think there are plenty of other policy changes that could deliver it with less collateral damage to the economy and without reducing people's rights and opportunities as Brexit has. I am also sceptical of all this championing of the lower paid from the kind of people who would normally cross the road to piss on the working class.

    There's a strong element of self interest in wanting the condition of the lower paid to improve. It means they are less likely to support the radical left.
  • IshmaelZ said:

    After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?

    https://twitter.com/Scott_Wortley/status/1441323652062932995?s=20

    Laugh as much as you like, I'm the one with 80 litres of diesel in the tank and all Tavistock's remaining supplies of tonic water in the larder.
    I can sell you an 18 month old toilet roll

    £1 a sheet
    Used, or as new?

    (PS - how's Wes Streeting's leadership bid going?)
  • HYUFDHYUFD Posts: 116,709
    Montserrat limits visitors to only those earning more than $70,000 a year and they must still quarantine for 2 weeks on arrival and take a Covid test
    https://www.euronews.com/travel/2021/09/22/montserrat-this-caribbean-island-is-open-but-only-to-the-super-rich
  • IshmaelZ said:

    After reading the news this morning I went to the shop to buy some panic but they have run out even though I am assured there's enough panic to go round. What do I do?

    https://twitter.com/Scott_Wortley/status/1441323652062932995?s=20

    Laugh as much as you like, I'm the one with 80 litres of diesel in the tank and all Tavistock's remaining supplies of tonic water in the larder.
    I can sell you an 18 month old toilet roll

    £1 a sheet
    used...

  • James Melville
    @JamesMelville
    ·
    15h
    Sweden has announced they will not implement vaccine passports. Hats off to Sweden. Again.
    #NoVaccinePassports
    Heart suitFlag of Sweden
  • eekeek Posts: 24,797

    Anybody reading this thread would be tempted to think that in the olden days, before the EU, FOM and imported labour, British employers paid the working class generous wages that have only been undercut since we joined the EU (and then later when we imported workers from the accession countries). It's laughable - low wages have always been at the forefront of British capitalism, and it was only in the heavily unionised sectors that manual workers could bargain for higher wages. Why do people think London Transport and others were so keen on the Windrush immigrants? I suspect that the decline of the power of trades unions has more to do with the low wages in many sectors than imported labour.

    Anyway, it's great to see so many Tories now advocating higher wages for the working class. At least something we can all agree on.

    Windrush was at a time of high employment.

    The current issues relate to a combination of a rising minimum wage attached to unlimited immigration that contributed to more and more work becoming minimum wage.
  • bigjohnowlsbigjohnowls Posts: 21,723

    Interesting poll on Starmer and much my view of him

    https://twitter.com/OpiniumResearch/status/1441346885411741699?s=19

    Boring weak and out of touch a given, with incompetent to follow when people take actual notice
This discussion has been closed.