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Day 41 of the Truss premiership and some terrible front pages – politicalbetting.com

SystemSystem Posts: 11,002
edited October 2022 in General
imageDay 41 of the Truss premiership and some terrible front pages – politicalbetting.com

It was always going to be a problem for Truss that she only won the support of less than 19% of the parliamentary Conservative Party during the leadership election first round. She was the third choice of MPs

Read the full story here

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Comments

  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,912
    She is toast. They will have to find some kind of safe pair of hands candidate to steady the ship and hold off the inevitable general election as long as possible. I reckon Kwarteng will be out within weeks and Truss within months.
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,912
    Nobody else about? (I am in the US, not suddenly become an insomniac).
  • edmundintokyoedmundintokyo Posts: 17,136

    She is toast. They will have to find some kind of safe pair of hands candidate to steady the ship and hold off the inevitable general election as long as possible. I reckon Kwarteng will be out within weeks and Truss within months.

    The members won't vote for a safe pair of hands, they'll vote for the choice of the maddest 1/3 of the parliamentary party again. Would the MPs be unified enough to pull off a stitch-up?
  • OnlyLivingBoyOnlyLivingBoy Posts: 14,912

    She is toast. They will have to find some kind of safe pair of hands candidate to steady the ship and hold off the inevitable general election as long as possible. I reckon Kwarteng will be out within weeks and Truss within months.

    The members won't vote for a safe pair of hands, they'll vote for the choice of the maddest 1/3 of the parliamentary party again. Would the MPs be unified enough to pull off a stitch-up?
    I think they will have to. No way can this go to the members again. Mind you, expecting the MPs to have the discipline to organise around a sensible choice then not implode for two years is perhaps too much. I just don't see how they can allow Truss to stay in office - I can't believe their survival instincts have deserted them altogether.
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146
    - “My 2022 and 2023 bets on her exit starting to look good.”

    @stjohn says on the previous thread that the best value bet around at the moment is laying Truss to be PM after the next GE, over at Smarkets.

    Ok, no punter likes tying up cash for too long, but he reckons that even if he has to wait two years, he’s going to make a 28% return. There are worse investments at the moment.

    He’s theoretically risking his stake, but c’mon, Liz Truss is never going to be PM after the next GE. It is now virtually impossible.
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146
    edited October 2022

    I was thinking that the Conservatives might do best in the longer term if they instigated PR and went to the country. I know it sounds desperate but they really are stuffed.

    It's possible that the voters determined to put the Tories out of power (75%+) may vote instead for what they believe because the chance of continuity conservative deconstruction of the economy would be tiny.

    PR might shortcut the tactical voted parliament where the Conservatives don't exist and avoid the possibility of everyone deciding to move on without them.

    I'm not a Conservative but I do think we should have a plethora of views in Parliament. I'm offering this idea for the good of democracy knowing that they would not do the same for me. (The high ground has a nice view.)

    An intriguing post and a novel suggestion. By jove, I think you may be on to something!

    Added benefit (from a Tory perspective): prevents another SNP landslide north of the border (45% of the vote really ought to give apporoximately 45% of legislators, not 90%).

    As @OnlyLivingBoy says above: their infamous survival instincts cannot have deserted the Tories altogether? Surely?

    For decades PR was just a Lib Dem/SNP pipe dream. Now there are compelling arguments that it is in the narrow partisan interests of both Labour and the Tories too.

    A. For Labour, to prevent the Tories ever forming a single-party majority government ever again

    B. For Tories, to prevent Canada extinction-level GE.
  • GardenwalkerGardenwalker Posts: 20,812
    I think Rishi is a douche, but one can hear - all the way in the US - the slow ticking of Tory brains as they conclude he is the only option.
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146

    I think Rishi is a douche, but one can hear - all the way in the US - the slow ticking of Tory brains as they conclude he is the only option.

    It’s Rishi’s fault Liz is PM.
    He fixed it so that the run-off was Rishi-Liz and not Rishi-Penny, in the mistaken belief that members of the Conservative and Unionist Party have an iota of common sense.

    Nope. Rishi is damaged goods.

    The Oaf is severely damaged goods.

    Wallace is a feartie.

    Gove is a slimebag.

    Braverman would do even worse than Truss.

    Gotta be Mordaunt or May, surely?

    Knowing Tories, they’ll go for the biggest slimebag. Congratulations Michael!
  • In their last couple of leadership elections, both main parties have managed to elect an extremist who did/does not enjoy anything like enough support from their parliamentary party and who would never command enough support nationally to win a general election.

    The only difference between the two parties' situations is that (fortuitously for them) Labour happened to do it while they were in opposition, so it was much more damaging to them than it was to the country. Doing it while in Government inflicts significant damage to the country too, as we're seeing.

    In the next GE I'll vote for any party which proposes to legislate to ban any political party with more than, say, 40 MPs from leaving their final choice of leader in the hands of their membership!

    (though I know that's pure fantasy, of course)
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146

    In their last couple of leadership elections, both main parties have managed to elect an extremist who did/does not enjoy anything like enough support from their parliamentary party and who would never command enough support nationally to win a general election.

    The only difference between the two parties' situations is that (fortuitously for them) Labour happened to do it while they were in opposition, so it was much more damaging to them than it was to the country. Doing it while in Government inflicts significant damage to the country too, as we're seeing.

    In the next GE I'll vote for any party which proposes to legislate to ban any political party with more than, say, 40 MPs from leaving their final choice of leader in the hands of their membership!

    (though I know that's pure fantasy, of course)

    If you think Corbyn and Truss are bad, you ought to have a look at the long list of duds elected by Scottish Labour members:

    2007 Wendy Alexander
    2008 Iain Gray
    2011 Johan Lamont
    2014 Jim Murphy
    2015 Kezia Dugdale
    2017 Richard Leonard
    2021 Anas Sarwar

    The talent pool is admittedly tiny, but they still managed to pick total crackers there.

    Luckily, as you say, when parties do it in Opposition, they solely damage themselves and not the country.
  • I agree Truss is toast, Mike, but I don't see how she goes.

    VoNC? Can't happen in her first year of office, I don't think.

    Enough letters go in to make the 1922 Committee change the rules in that regard? This would require agreement across the party and I can't see that happening (though I'm no expert in the internal mechanisms for this to happen).

    LizT jumps before she's pushed? She won't do that; there's always the chance Ukraine will be her Falklands, so why not hang on and hope?

    Mass resignations mean she can't form a Government (à la Boris)? Her cabinet is stuffed full of loyalists (one can see why now!) so I can't see that happening.

    We can talk about Tory MPs' survival instincts as much as we like but when you're in a room without windows, defenestration is impossible.
  • StuartDicksonStuartDickson Posts: 12,146

    I agree Truss is toast, Mike, but I don't see how she goes.

    VoNC? Can't happen in her first year of office, I don't think.

    Enough letters go in to make the 1922 Committee change the rules in that regard? This would require agreement across the party and I can't see that happening (though I'm no expert in the internal mechanisms for this to happen).

    LizT jumps before she's pushed? She won't do that; there's always the chance Ukraine will be her Falklands, so why not hang on and hope?

    Mass resignations mean she can't form a Government (à la Boris)? Her cabinet is stuffed full of loyalists (one can see why now!) so I can't see that happening.

    We can talk about Tory MPs' survival instincts as much as we like but when you're in a room without windows, defenestration is impossible.

    Resignation due to health or family issues.
    It’s the only reasonably graceful exit strategy for her and her party from this unfortunate point.

  • Resignation due to health or family issues.
    It’s the only reasonably graceful exit strategy for her and her party from this unfortunate point.


    Why would she do that though? We've seen very recently how brazenly people will try to hang on in No.10 against all odds... I can't see her gracefully stepping aside, can you?

  • Resignation due to health or family issues.
    It’s the only reasonably graceful exit strategy for her and her party from this unfortunate point.


    Why would she do that though? We've seen very recently how brazenly people will try to hang on in No.10 against all odds... I can't see her gracefully stepping aside, can you?



    Sorry, not got the quoting mechanism quite right yet...!!
  • HeathenerHeathener Posts: 5,097
    I really like from @MikeSmithson:

    "Essentially she has over-reached herself."

    A straightforward but devastating summary.
  • DecrepiterJohnLDecrepiterJohnL Posts: 23,926
    edited October 2022


    Resignation due to health or family issues.
    It’s the only reasonably graceful exit strategy for her and her party from this unfortunate point.

    Why would she do that though? We've seen very recently how brazenly people will try to hang on in No.10 against all odds... I can't see her gracefully stepping aside, can you?

    Sorry, not got the quoting mechanism quite right yet...!!
    The quoting mechanism is pressing the quote button, adding your new comment at the bottom, and letting the system do the rest. Don't try to edit the quoted material unless you know what you are doing. Keep your fingers crossed that Vanilla does not mess things up, which it does from time to time.

    ETA ironically, I did need to edit the quoted material to remove a couple of spurious end-blockquote tags.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,575
    This could be pretty useful for Ukraine, as the shortage of medium range AA missiles is severe.

    https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical/status/1580336815965622274
    UK to donate air defence missiles to Ukraine

    The UK will donate AMRAAMs compatible with NASAMS, and “Hundreds of additional air defence missiles of other types would also be donated, along with more aerial drones and a further 18 howitzers”
  • StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 6,770

    She is toast. They will have to find some kind of safe pair of hands candidate to steady the ship and hold off the inevitable general election as long as possible. I reckon Kwarteng will be out within weeks and Truss within months.

    The members won't vote for a safe pair of hands, they'll vote for the choice of the maddest 1/3 of the parliamentary party again. Would the MPs be unified enough to pull off a stitch-up?
    Suspend the whip of the mad ones before the vote?
  • StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 6,770

    I think Rishi is a douche, but one can hear - all the way in the US - the slow ticking of Tory brains as they conclude he is the only option.

    It’s Rishi’s fault Liz is PM.
    He fixed it so that the run-off was Rishi-Liz and not Rishi-Penny, in the mistaken belief that members of the Conservative and Unionist Party have an iota of common sense.

    Nope. Rishi is damaged goods.

    The Oaf is severely damaged goods.

    Wallace is a feartie.

    Gove is a slimebag.

    Braverman would do even worse than Truss.

    Gotta be Mordaunt or May, surely?

    Knowing Tories, they’ll go for the biggest slimebag. Congratulations Michael!

    Michael… Green..?

  • M&S to close quarter of bigger shops as it struggles with rising costs
    Retailer plans to close 67 full-line stores

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/10/12/ms-close-quarter-bigger-shops-struggles-rising-costs/ (£££)

    This matters because the loss of big-name shops, sometimes called destination stores, was a big factor in red wall seats. Any government interested in self-preservation, let alone levelling up, would do well to look at ways of defending the high street.
  • StillWatersStillWaters Posts: 6,770

    In their last couple of leadership elections, both main parties have managed to elect an extremist who did/does not enjoy anything like enough support from their parliamentary party and who would never command enough support nationally to win a general election.

    The only difference between the two parties' situations is that (fortuitously for them) Labour happened to do it while they were in opposition, so it was much more damaging to them than it was to the country. Doing it while in Government inflicts significant damage to the country too, as we're seeing.

    In the next GE I'll vote for any party which proposes to legislate to ban any political party with more than, say, 40 MPs from leaving their final choice of leader in the hands of their membership!

    (though I know that's pure fantasy, of course)

    If you think Corbyn and Truss are bad, you ought to have a look at the long list of duds elected by Scottish Labour members:

    2007 Wendy Alexander
    2008 Iain Gray
    2011 Johan Lamont
    2014 Jim Murphy
    2015 Kezia Dugdale
    2017 Richard Leonard
    2021 Anas Sarwar

    The talent pool is admittedly tiny, but they still managed to pick total crackers there.

    Luckily, as you say, when parties do it in Opposition, they solely damage themselves and not the country.
    To be fair to SLAB they have picked duds not people who are actively dangerous

  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,933
    Good morning, everyone.

    Truss back down to 5.3 to go this year on Betfair.
  • I agree Truss is toast, Mike, but I don't see how she goes.

    VoNC? Can't happen in her first year of office, I don't think.

    Enough letters go in to make the 1922 Committee change the rules in that regard? This would require agreement across the party and I can't see that happening (though I'm no expert in the internal mechanisms for this to happen).

    LizT jumps before she's pushed? She won't do that; there's always the chance Ukraine will be her Falklands, so why not hang on and hope?

    Mass resignations mean she can't form a Government (à la Boris)? Her cabinet is stuffed full of loyalists (one can see why now!) so I can't see that happening.

    We can talk about Tory MPs' survival instincts as much as we like but when you're in a room without windows, defenestration is impossible.

    Truss does not have a majority in the Commons. It's that simple. KT are ploughing on with their "we are right, you are wrong" approach despite on repeated occasions being forced to do a massive climbdown.

    So the scenario is the May scenario. Mrs Brady goes to her, points to the open rebellion and inability to do anything at all from her program, and offers the pearl-handled revolver. For the party ...
  • In their last couple of leadership elections, both main parties have managed to elect an extremist who did/does not enjoy anything like enough support from their parliamentary party and who would never command enough support nationally to win a general election.

    The only difference between the two parties' situations is that (fortuitously for them) Labour happened to do it while they were in opposition, so it was much more damaging to them than it was to the country. Doing it while in Government inflicts significant damage to the country too, as we're seeing.

    In the next GE I'll vote for any party which proposes to legislate to ban any political party with more than, say, 40 MPs from leaving their final choice of leader in the hands of their membership!

    (though I know that's pure fantasy, of course)

    If you think Corbyn and Truss are bad, you ought to have a look at the long list of duds elected by Scottish Labour members:

    2007 Wendy Alexander
    2008 Iain Gray
    2011 Johan Lamont
    2014 Jim Murphy
    2015 Kezia Dugdale
    2017 Richard Leonard
    2021 Anas Sarwar

    The talent pool is admittedly tiny, but they still managed to pick total crackers there.

    Luckily, as you say, when parties do it in Opposition, they solely damage themselves and not the country.
    Wendy Alexander was not a "dud". She fell out with "old Labour" MSPs because she expected them to work harder. .
  • If The Queen Consort wears it then it is an insult to over a billion people and the fact the the Royal Family don't give a shit about their bloody colonial past.

    Plans for Queen Camilla to be honoured with a crown containing the Koh-i-Noor diamond at the coronation next year could be dropped because of “political sensitivities”, it was claimed yesterday.

    The crown was specially made for Queen Elizabeth — later the Queen Mother — in 1937. Previously the diamond was mounted in the crowns of Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII, and Queen Mary, wife of George V.

    The Koh-i-Noor was acquired by the East India Company after the Anglo-Sikh Wars and presented to Queen Victoria in 1850. A campaign has sprung up in India urging Britain to return it, although it is also claimed by Afghanistan and Pakistan.

    A source told the Daily Mail: “There are serious political sensitivities and significant nervousness.”

    According to The Daily Telegraph, a spokesman for the Bharatiya Janata Party of Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, said: “The coronation of Camilla and the use of the crown jewel Koh-i-Noor brings back painful memories of the colonial past.”


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-10-bank-holiday-king-coronation-downing-street-nz92p7nv9
  • Anyway, song for the day:

    Elton John: Funeral for a Friend / Love Lies Bleeding
  • On topic, you should have listened to that always wise and modest PBer who said Truss would prove to be rubbish and would be ousted by conference 2023.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,084
    Heathener said:

    I really like from @MikeSmithson:

    "Essentially she has over-reached herself."

    A straightforward but devastating summary.

    As I said yesterday, she arrived in the job thinking she was the new ‘world king’ and could simply pick up with the capricious decision-making from where Johnson had left off, seemingly without any awareness of the weakness of her position and without the sense to do some ground work with her colleagues and officials before launching off on a novel approach to economic policy.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,084
    edited October 2022

    In their last couple of leadership elections, both main parties have managed to elect an extremist who did/does not enjoy anything like enough support from their parliamentary party and who would never command enough support nationally to win a general election.

    The only difference between the two parties' situations is that (fortuitously for them) Labour happened to do it while they were in opposition, so it was much more damaging to them than it was to the country. Doing it while in Government inflicts significant damage to the country too, as we're seeing.

    In the next GE I'll vote for any party which proposes to legislate to ban any political party with more than, say, 40 MPs from leaving their final choice of leader in the hands of their membership!

    (though I know that's pure fantasy, of course)

    If you think Corbyn and Truss are bad, you ought to have a look at the long list of duds elected by Scottish Labour members:

    2007 Wendy Alexander
    2008 Iain Gray
    2011 Johan Lamont
    2014 Jim Murphy
    2015 Kezia Dugdale
    2017 Richard Leonard
    2021 Anas Sarwar

    The talent pool is admittedly tiny, but they still managed to pick total crackers there.

    Luckily, as you say, when parties do it in Opposition, they solely damage themselves and not the country.
    To be fair to SLAB they have picked duds not people who are actively dangerous

    The more fundamental point is that when in opposition parties have (and should have) more freedom to be ‘adventurous’ with their choices; the public always has the right and opportunity to say “no thanks, try again”.

    When in office we public get lumbered with whoever the party chooses, and if those doing the choosing become irresponsible in doing so, they deserve to be punished for it. Because we certainly are being.
  • AlistairMAlistairM Posts: 2,004

    I think Rishi is a douche, but one can hear - all the way in the US - the slow ticking of Tory brains as they conclude he is the only option.

    Penny as PM. Rishi as Chancellor.

    I don't think the MPs can get away with crowning Rishi when he just lost with the membership. Penny would have likely beaten Rishi with membership. Joint ticket for stability and for about the best chance of retaining the Tory MPs' seats.

    Penny is personable in a way that Truss never was. She can't win the next general election but she can limit the losses.
  • PulpstarPulpstar Posts: 75,842

    Good morning, everyone.

    Truss back down to 5.3 to go this year on Betfair.

    She'll survive this year. Next year is no bet for me at current ofds
  • HeathenerHeathener Posts: 5,097
    edited October 2022

    If The Queen Consort wears it then it is an insult to over a billion people and the fact the the Royal Family don't give a shit about their bloody colonial past.

    Plans for Queen Camilla to be honoured with a crown containing the Koh-i-Noor diamond at the coronation next year could be dropped because of “political sensitivities”, it was claimed yesterday.

    The crown was specially made for Queen Elizabeth — later the Queen Mother — in 1937. Previously the diamond was mounted in the crowns of Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII, and Queen Mary, wife of George V.

    The Koh-i-Noor was acquired by the East India Company after the Anglo-Sikh Wars and presented to Queen Victoria in 1850. A campaign has sprung up in India urging Britain to return it, although it is also claimed by Afghanistan and Pakistan.

    A source told the Daily Mail: “There are serious political sensitivities and significant nervousness.”

    According to The Daily Telegraph, a spokesman for the Bharatiya Janata Party of Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, said: “The coronation of Camilla and the use of the crown jewel Koh-i-Noor brings back painful memories of the colonial past.”


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-10-bank-holiday-king-coronation-downing-street-nz92p7nv9

    I don't wish to irritate those on the right, but the East India Company were an absolute disgrace. An appalling organisation which became a front for state-sponsored banditry, larceny, and manslaughter. (God I love an Oxford comma.) Their involvement not only in slavery but in, for example, the opium trade which led to millions of Chinese opium addicts is just one of the abysmal legacies which they both got away with and which funded some of Britain's colonial prosperity.

    Just one of many history lessons that should be taught to ALL British school children but which never is:

    https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-49404024

    The British Empire benign? Bollocks.

    Of course it should be noted that the East India Company did eventually fall foul of the British Government who decided that they had gone all Colonel Kurz on them.
  • Morris_DancerMorris_Dancer Posts: 60,933
    Mr. B2, perhaps it's down to outsourcing non-top jobs to places where factories and the like are cheaper to run, denying the work in the West, helping the East/Africa, but also (within Western nations) being relatively bad for the middle class?
  • If The Queen Consort wears it then it is an insult to over a billion people and the fact the the Royal Family don't give a shit about their bloody colonial past.

    Plans for Queen Camilla to be honoured with a crown containing the Koh-i-Noor diamond at the coronation next year could be dropped because of “political sensitivities”, it was claimed yesterday.

    The crown was specially made for Queen Elizabeth — later the Queen Mother — in 1937. Previously the diamond was mounted in the crowns of Queen Alexandra, wife of Edward VII, and Queen Mary, wife of George V.

    The Koh-i-Noor was acquired by the East India Company after the Anglo-Sikh Wars and presented to Queen Victoria in 1850. A campaign has sprung up in India urging Britain to return it, although it is also claimed by Afghanistan and Pakistan.

    A source told the Daily Mail: “There are serious political sensitivities and significant nervousness.”

    According to The Daily Telegraph, a spokesman for the Bharatiya Janata Party of Narendra Modi, the Indian prime minister, said: “The coronation of Camilla and the use of the crown jewel Koh-i-Noor brings back painful memories of the colonial past.”


    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/no-10-bank-holiday-king-coronation-downing-street-nz92p7nv9

    And if the Koh-i-Noor cannot be worn, it might as well be returned to India. The Indian Prime Minister perhaps has this in mind.
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,084
    edited October 2022

    Mr. B2, perhaps it's down to outsourcing non-top jobs to places where factories and the like are cheaper to run, denying the work in the West, helping the East/Africa, but also (within Western nations) being relatively bad for the middle class?

    Yes, an alternative - or possibly complementary - hypothesis is that the combination of technology and so-called globalisation has exposed everyone to competition, which has driven down our worth, except for those in charge whose reach, and hence worth, has expanded.

    From the perspective of the real global poor, this is of course good news, because they are being slowly levelled with us.

    There have been prior periods in history when power and wealth has aggregated towards a small elite, and the eventual outcome has tended to be political turbulence, often of a violent nature.

    The ironic circularity is of course that such pressures are behind the origins of communism.

    Perhaps what is missing today is any sort of coherent ideology or alternative model (to globalistic capitalism - which has become proto-oligarchic) powerful enough to be both credible and around which modern revolutionaries (and voters) can gather?
  • maxhmaxh Posts: 815
    IanB2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    FPT:

    Pagan2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pagan2 said:

    What annoys me reading tonight is that all the blame for where we are is being put on truss and kwasi. Have they made things worse certainly they have and I have no liking for either.

    However where we are is the end point of 30 odd years of centrist social democratic style governement. It has left millions in this country unable to live despite working 40 hours a week without having to rely on governement handouts or food banks or both.

    Most of that time spent within the EU before anyone goes yeah but brexit. Centrist governments have failed a lot of people in this country while companies and their directors made out like bandits. The difference now is it is beginning to hit people on this board most of whom weren't in those bottom cohorts so now you are starting to cry and whine about it.

    Welcome to the poorhouse you deserve it.

    Forget Brexit.

    What is it you propose?

    Where is prospering, and what policies have they implemented that are appropriate for the UK?

    And there are two massive headwinds you need to at the very least acknowledge.

    Firstly, there's demographics.
    Secondly, there's all the people in the world - and we're not talking immigrants - who are prepared to do your job for less.

    I don't believe anywhere in the west is prospering when you consider the life of the median citizen, they are finding housing costs rising, tax rising,energy price rising and food rising all more than their pay over the last 3 to 4 decades. All the west has been doing the social democratic lie of we can have more and more public services but not raise tax and funded it through borrowing. UK, germany, france etc.

    Time to be realistic. We need to fund those public services we consider essential properly. We need to stop putting the cost of that on generations unborn. What we cant fund we need to tell people I am sorry we cant fund that and cut it.

    I laid out the 5 tenets of where I come from.

    Personally I prefer a small state but the 5 principles I think is where we need to be before we even talk about small state vs big state....fiscal stability
    I wrote a piece of research about six or seven years ago which said pretty much the same thing:

    For much of the post war period, developed countries – and their citizens – had it pretty good.

    Unemployment was negligible, crime low, and each generation successively richer. A German, Japanese or American father could look down on his children and feel confident that their lives would be better than his.

    But then something changed. The children of the 2000s ceased being wealthier than their parents. And while incomes had apparently risen, so had the prices of petrol, of energy and of rent. While families of the 1970s could survive - or even prosper – with one working parent, it now required two. Young people were leaving college with ever larger amounts of debt and failing to find the kind of
    secure, well paid jobs their father’s had.

    We see these trends wherever we look. Take the US, generally considered (by us in Europe at least) to have been the most successful developed economy in the world in the recent past. According to the US Federal Reserve, real median household income is down almost 10% since peaking in 1999.

    That’s an unprecedented reduction, and is all the more shocking in the context of a country where headline GDP growth has been relatively strong.
    The story in the US - replicated to a lesser extent around the rest of the developed world - is that the benefits of that growth have been appropriated mostly by a small group of the rich and powerful, and hence denied from the rest of us.


    I do wonder whether the hypothesis that the
    fall of communism removed the imperative to demonstrate the superiority of capitalism through sharing the benefits of growth more widely, because the potential alternative to capitalism had been defeated and the potential threat to the powerful of revolution went away, has something to it.
    Really interesting thread, thanks pagan for starting it. I’m surprised by the diagnosis of centrist government as the source of the problem, though. To me the source is really quite simple - shareholder capitalism prioritising dividends and short term profit over investment.

    The solution, in my view, is some form of stakeholder capitalism. Employees, customers and local communities (ie those with a long term interest in the growth of a business) owning as large a stake in that business as economically possible.

    I don’t think it’s government that is the problem, though I agree with other parts of your diagnosis.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,771
    IanB2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    FPT:

    Pagan2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pagan2 said:

    What annoys me reading tonight is that all the blame for where we are is being put on truss and kwasi. Have they made things worse certainly they have and I have no liking for either.

    However where we are is the end point of 30 odd years of centrist social democratic style governement. It has left millions in this country unable to live despite working 40 hours a week without having to rely on governement handouts or food banks or both.

    Most of that time spent within the EU before anyone goes yeah but brexit. Centrist governments have failed a lot of people in this country while companies and their directors made out like bandits. The difference now is it is beginning to hit people on this board most of whom weren't in those bottom cohorts so now you are starting to cry and whine about it.

    Welcome to the poorhouse you deserve it.

    Forget Brexit.

    What is it you propose?

    Where is prospering, and what policies have they implemented that are appropriate for the UK?

    And there are two massive headwinds you need to at the very least acknowledge.

    Firstly, there's demographics.
    Secondly, there's all the people in the world - and we're not talking immigrants - who are prepared to do your job for less.

    I don't believe anywhere in the west is prospering when you consider the life of the median citizen, they are finding housing costs rising, tax rising,energy price rising and food rising all more than their pay over the last 3 to 4 decades. All the west has been doing the social democratic lie of we can have more and more public services but not raise tax and funded it through borrowing. UK, germany, france etc.

    Time to be realistic. We need to fund those public services we consider essential properly. We need to stop putting the cost of that on generations unborn. What we cant fund we need to tell people I am sorry we cant fund that and cut it.

    I laid out the 5 tenets of where I come from.

    Personally I prefer a small state but the 5 principles I think is where we need to be before we even talk about small state vs big state....fiscal stability
    I wrote a piece of research about six or seven years ago which said pretty much the same thing:

    For much of the post war period, developed countries – and their citizens – had it pretty good.

    Unemployment was negligible, crime low, and each generation successively richer. A German, Japanese or American father could look down on his children and feel confident that their lives would be better than his.

    But then something changed. The children of the 2000s ceased being wealthier than their parents. And while incomes had apparently risen, so had the prices of petrol, of energy and of rent. While families of the 1970s could survive - or even prosper – with one working parent, it now required two. Young people were leaving college with ever larger amounts of debt and failing to find the kind of
    secure, well paid jobs their father’s had.

    We see these trends wherever we look. Take the US, generally considered (by us in Europe at least) to have been the most successful developed economy in the world in the recent past. According to the US Federal Reserve, real median household income is down almost 10% since peaking in 1999.

    That’s an unprecedented reduction, and is all the more shocking in the context of a country where headline GDP growth has been relatively strong.
    The story in the US - replicated to a lesser extent around the rest of the developed world - is that the benefits of that growth have been appropriated mostly by a small group of the rich and powerful, and hence denied from the rest of us.

    I do wonder whether the hypothesis that the fall of communism removed the imperative to demonstrate the superiority of capitalism through sharing the benefits of growth more widely, because the potential alternative to capitalism had been defeated and the potential threat to the powerful of revolution went away, has something to it.
    From the same piece...

    Per capita GDP grew in many places, but median income did not. Why the disconnect? We see the issue as widening inequality, which is why there is so much concern about the “1%”. Statistics on the share of income taken by the richest show that inequality has been rising from the early 1980s. It’s an old adage that it is easier to share gains than losses: when everyone’s income was rising, the difference between the richest and the rest seemed a price worth paying.

    Across the developed world, people are discontented because the old post War consensus has been broken. We are no longer all getting richer. And worse, we have a situation where a certain segment (the elites, the one percent, etc.) have gotten richer, while many others have gotten poorer. With consumer debt at elevated levels in many places, and the cost of entry into the middle classes – a college degree – both costing more and offering less, we should not be surprised that the stratification in society is resulting in fractures.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739
    EXC: Suella Braverman has been cut out of immigration reform planning as PM prepares to relax rules. Tory MPs with concerns about local businesses being short-staffed have been told to go to the CO & BEIS rather than the Home Office in a snub to Braverman

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/20090866/home-sec-snubbed-immigration-reform/

    Moderates have accused Suella Braverman of freelancing on immigration policies and running her own leadership campaign inside the HO

    Source told The Sun: “It's clear that there is widespread frustration in gov with Suella’s freelancing. She's running a blatant leadership campaign but it’s having a destabilising effect on the gov. She needs to focus on the day job and stop her antics or she won’t last long."
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739
    James Cleverly refuses three times to confirm that the government won't U-turn on keeping corporation tax at 19p.

    Sounds like he's preparing the ground for a humiliating climbdown.


    https://twitter.com/KevinASchofield/status/1580440338271203328
  • ThomasNasheThomasNashe Posts: 4,922

    In their last couple of leadership elections, both main parties have managed to elect an extremist who did/does not enjoy anything like enough support from their parliamentary party and who would never command enough support nationally to win a general election.

    The only difference between the two parties' situations is that (fortuitously for them) Labour happened to do it while they were in opposition, so it was much more damaging to them than it was to the country. Doing it while in Government inflicts significant damage to the country too, as we're seeing.

    In the next GE I'll vote for any party which proposes to legislate to ban any political party with more than, say, 40 MPs from leaving their final choice of leader in the hands of their membership!

    (though I know that's pure fantasy, of course)

    If you think Corbyn and Truss are bad, you ought to have a look at the long list of duds elected by Scottish Labour members:

    2007 Wendy Alexander
    2008 Iain Gray
    2011 Johan Lamont
    2014 Jim Murphy
    2015 Kezia Dugdale
    2017 Richard Leonard
    2021 Anas Sarwar

    The talent pool is admittedly tiny, but they still managed to pick total crackers there.

    Luckily, as you say, when parties do it in Opposition, they solely damage themselves and not the country.
    Wendy Alexander was not a "dud". She fell out with "old Labour" MSPs because she expected them to work harder. .
    Personally, I quite liked Kezia. Shame it didn’t work out. What’s she doing nowadays?
  • darkagedarkage Posts: 4,746

    She is toast. They will have to find some kind of safe pair of hands candidate to steady the ship and hold off the inevitable general election as long as possible. I reckon Kwarteng will be out within weeks and Truss within months.

    The members won't vote for a safe pair of hands, they'll vote for the choice of the maddest 1/3 of the parliamentary party again. Would the MPs be unified enough to pull off a stitch-up?
    I think they will have to. No way can this go to the members again. Mind you, expecting the MPs to have the discipline to organise around a sensible choice then not implode for two years is perhaps too much. I just don't see how they can allow Truss to stay in office - I can't believe their survival instincts have deserted them altogether.
    I think this now all goes down to the question of whether Tory MP's see how bad the situation is and can all agree on what to do about it.
  • JonathanJonathan Posts: 20,901
    Would it be possible to offer Liz Truss to India? We might also substitute Rees-Moggs ego for diamond. It’s bigger and shinier.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,771
    (Almost) final exert from The Discontented:

    To understand our current predicament, we need to first understand where we came from. Growing up in the post war period in the developed world was like winning the lottery: you were a member of the global 1% by accident of birth. The reason the developed world was so well off is that it had learned the secret of manufacturing, and it was where all the capital (in terms of machines that made things) had been deployed.

    Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the developed world exported manufactured products and services, while the developing world (including China) exported raw materials. This relationship was very good for workers in rich economies, as they were the bottleneck in world economic production. The producers of raw materials – say Brazil and China for iron ore, and the Middle East and Nigeria for oil – were poor, and the makers of cars were rich.

    This began to change with the emergence of the tiger economies in the late 1980s and 1990s: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. Entrepreneurs in these countries realised that they had something that the old world did not - plentiful, cheap, labour – and that buying capital goods from Germany or Japan enabled them to compete on the world stage.

    Where these small countries led, China and others are now following. China – which just 20 years ago was an exporter of coal, oil and various other commodities – is now a manufacturing powerhouse and commodity importer. The developed world’s core competence, turning raw materials into manufactured products, was taken away from them.

    The Three Pillars of Discontent
    The symptoms then are clear: the traditional growth driver of the developed world is behind it, and we suffer from stagnant GDP and rising inequality. But the cause of the ultimate disease is more complicated than just China learned to manufacture things. Indeed, we see three long-term drivers behind the developed world’s malaise: demographics, commodities and globalisation.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739
    The origin of our current malaise was the Brexit referendum. Charitably, it was a risky bet on a radical shift in our long-established and reasonably successful economic and geopolitical model and the bet has been lost. What we are seeing now is government by sunk-cost fallacy.

    https://twitter.com/ProfBrianCox/status/1580343794095955969
    https://twitter.com/LBC/status/1580259735114219539
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,771
    maxh said:

    IanB2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    FPT:

    Pagan2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pagan2 said:

    What annoys me reading tonight is that all the blame for where we are is being put on truss and kwasi. Have they made things worse certainly they have and I have no liking for either.

    However where we are is the end point of 30 odd years of centrist social democratic style governement. It has left millions in this country unable to live despite working 40 hours a week without having to rely on governement handouts or food banks or both.

    Most of that time spent within the EU before anyone goes yeah but brexit. Centrist governments have failed a lot of people in this country while companies and their directors made out like bandits. The difference now is it is beginning to hit people on this board most of whom weren't in those bottom cohorts so now you are starting to cry and whine about it.

    Welcome to the poorhouse you deserve it.

    Forget Brexit.

    What is it you propose?

    Where is prospering, and what policies have they implemented that are appropriate for the UK?

    And there are two massive headwinds you need to at the very least acknowledge.

    Firstly, there's demographics.
    Secondly, there's all the people in the world - and we're not talking immigrants - who are prepared to do your job for less.

    I don't believe anywhere in the west is prospering when you consider the life of the median citizen, they are finding housing costs rising, tax rising,energy price rising and food rising all more than their pay over the last 3 to 4 decades. All the west has been doing the social democratic lie of we can have more and more public services but not raise tax and funded it through borrowing. UK, germany, france etc.

    Time to be realistic. We need to fund those public services we consider essential properly. We need to stop putting the cost of that on generations unborn. What we cant fund we need to tell people I am sorry we cant fund that and cut it.

    I laid out the 5 tenets of where I come from.

    Personally I prefer a small state but the 5 principles I think is where we need to be before we even talk about small state vs big state....fiscal stability
    I wrote a piece of research about six or seven years ago which said pretty much the same thing:

    For much of the post war period, developed countries – and their citizens – had it pretty good.

    Unemployment was negligible, crime low, and each generation successively richer. A German, Japanese or American father could look down on his children and feel confident that their lives would be better than his.

    But then something changed. The children of the 2000s ceased being wealthier than their parents. And while incomes had apparently risen, so had the prices of petrol, of energy and of rent. While families of the 1970s could survive - or even prosper – with one working parent, it now required two. Young people were leaving college with ever larger amounts of debt and failing to find the kind of
    secure, well paid jobs their father’s had.

    We see these trends wherever we look. Take the US, generally considered (by us in Europe at least) to have been the most successful developed economy in the world in the recent past. According to the US Federal Reserve, real median household income is down almost 10% since peaking in 1999.

    That’s an unprecedented reduction, and is all the more shocking in the context of a country where headline GDP growth has been relatively strong.
    The story in the US - replicated to a lesser extent around the rest of the developed world - is that the benefits of that growth have been appropriated mostly by a small group of the rich and powerful, and hence denied from the rest of us.


    I do wonder whether the hypothesis that the
    fall of communism removed the imperative to demonstrate the superiority of capitalism through sharing the benefits of growth more widely, because the potential alternative to capitalism had been defeated and the potential threat to the powerful of revolution went away, has something to it.
    Really interesting thread, thanks pagan for starting it. I’m surprised by the diagnosis of centrist government as the source of the problem, though. To me the source is really quite simple - shareholder capitalism prioritising dividends and short term profit over investment.

    The solution, in my view, is some form of stakeholder capitalism. Employees, customers and local communities (ie those with a long term interest in the growth of a business) owning as large a stake in that business as economically possible.

    I don’t think it’s government that is the problem, though I agree with other parts of your diagnosis.
    The fundamental problem is cognitive dissonance.

    Everyone starts from their conclusion (immigrants, China, shareholder capitalism, social democratic government) and works out how that is the key driver behind stagnant incomes.
  • logical_songlogical_song Posts: 9,669
    Scott_xP said:

    EXC: Suella Braverman has been cut out of immigration reform planning as PM prepares to relax rules. Tory MPs with concerns about local businesses being short-staffed have been told to go to the CO & BEIS rather than the Home Office in a snub to Braverman

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/20090866/home-sec-snubbed-immigration-reform/

    Moderates have accused Suella Braverman of freelancing on immigration policies and running her own leadership campaign inside the HO

    Source told The Sun: “It's clear that there is widespread frustration in gov with Suella’s freelancing. She's running a blatant leadership campaign but it’s having a destabilising effect on the gov. She needs to focus on the day job and stop her antics or she won’t last long."

    It's not just Liz, the whole government is not fit for purpose.
  • HeathenerHeathener Posts: 5,097
    Scott_xP said:

    The origin of our current malaise was the Brexit referendum. Charitably, it was a risky bet on a radical shift in our long-established and reasonably successful economic and geopolitical model and the bet has been lost. What we are seeing now is government by sunk-cost fallacy.

    https://twitter.com/ProfBrianCox/status/1580343794095955969
    https://twitter.com/LBC/status/1580259735114219539

    I think this is true. I'd like to add the adjective 'undeniably' but of course there are plenty of people still in denial.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739

    Personally, I quite liked Kezia. Shame it didn’t work out. What’s she doing nowadays?

    John Smith think tank, Glasgow Uni lecturer, and married to an SNP minister
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739

    It's not just Liz, the whole government is not fit for purpose.

    Maybe appointing a Cabinet through bribes to get (very temporary) leadership support isn't the best way to form a cohesive and balanced Government? Whodathunkit?
    https://twitter.com/DavidRoe92/status/1580442854106669056
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739
    Allister is back.

    In which we learn that the markets are being unfair to Britain over Brexit; it's everyone else's fault; and how Truss & Kwarteng need daily televised public briefings to explain why they're right.


    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/10/12/zombie-economy-crumbling-real-culprits-getting-scot-free/ https://twitter.com/rolandmcs/status/1580415229229309952/photo/1
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,084
    edited October 2022
    rcs1000 said:

    IanB2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    FPT:

    Pagan2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pagan2 said:

    What annoys me reading tonight is that all the blame for where we are is being put on truss and kwasi. Have they made things worse certainly they have and I have no liking for either.

    However where we are is the end point of 30 odd years of centrist social democratic style governement. It has left millions in this country unable to live despite working 40 hours a week without having to rely on governement handouts or food banks or both.

    Most of that time spent within the EU before anyone goes yeah but brexit. Centrist governments have failed a lot of people in this country while companies and their directors made out like bandits. The difference now is it is beginning to hit people on this board most of whom weren't in those bottom cohorts so now you are starting to cry and whine about it.

    Welcome to the poorhouse you deserve it.

    Forget Brexit.

    What is it you propose?

    Where is prospering, and what policies have they implemented that are appropriate for the UK?

    And there are two massive headwinds you need to at the very least acknowledge.

    Firstly, there's demographics.
    Secondly, there's all the people in the world - and we're not talking immigrants - who are prepared to do your job for less.

    I don't believe anywhere in the west is prospering when you consider the life of the median citizen, they are finding housing costs rising, tax rising,energy price rising and food rising all more than their pay over the last 3 to 4 decades. All the west has been doing the social democratic lie of we can have more and more public services but not raise tax and funded it through borrowing. UK, germany, france etc.

    Time to be realistic. We need to fund those public services we consider essential properly. We need to stop putting the cost of that on generations unborn. What we cant fund we need to tell people I am sorry we cant fund that and cut it.

    I laid out the 5 tenets of where I come from.

    Personally I prefer a small state but the 5 principles I think is where we need to be before we even talk about small state vs big state....fiscal stability
    I wrote a piece of research about six or seven years ago which said pretty much the same thing:

    For much of the post war period, developed countries – and their citizens – had it pretty good.

    Unemployment was negligible, crime low, and each generation successively richer. A German, Japanese or American father could look down on his children and feel confident that their lives would be better than his.

    But then something changed. The children of the 2000s ceased being wealthier than their parents. And while incomes had apparently risen, so had the prices of petrol, of energy and of rent. While families of the 1970s could survive - or even prosper – with one working parent, it now required two. Young people were leaving college with ever larger amounts of debt and failing to find the kind of
    secure, well paid jobs their father’s had.

    We see these trends wherever we look. Take the US, generally considered (by us in Europe at least) to have been the most successful developed economy in the world in the recent past. According to the US Federal Reserve, real median household income is down almost 10% since peaking in 1999.

    That’s an unprecedented reduction, and is all the more shocking in the context of a country where headline GDP growth has been relatively strong.
    The story in the US - replicated to a lesser extent around the rest of the developed world - is that the benefits of that growth have been appropriated mostly by a small group of the rich and powerful, and hence denied from the rest of us.

    I do wonder whether the hypothesis that the fall of communism removed the imperative to demonstrate the superiority of capitalism through sharing the benefits of growth more widely, because the potential alternative to capitalism had been defeated and the potential threat to the powerful of revolution went away, has something to it.
    From the same piece...

    Per capita GDP grew in many places, but median income did not. Why the disconnect? We see the issue as widening inequality, which is why there is so much concern about the “1%”. Statistics on the share of income taken by the richest show that inequality has been rising from the early 1980s. It’s an old adage that it is easier to share gains than losses: when everyone’s income was rising, the difference between the richest and the rest seemed a price worth paying.

    Across the developed world, people are discontented because the old post War consensus has been broken. We are no longer all getting richer. And worse, we have a situation where a certain segment (the elites, the one percent, etc.) have gotten richer, while many others have gotten poorer. With consumer debt at elevated levels in many places, and the cost of entry into the middle classes – a college degree – both costing more and offering less, we should not be surprised that the stratification in society is resulting in fractures.
    And conversation with lots of Americans over the past two months - which if they got beyond the superficial I would often steer in this direction because the inequality in the US is so striking, even coming from the UK - suggests to me that awareness of this issue is pretty strong. Right-leaning ones channel their frustration into what I would see as counter-productive radical politics and/or religion; left-leaning ones are simply frustrated that the political system seems unable to respond in any meaningful way to a concern that is so widely shared.

    More people than I expected were willing to say that they broadly agree with the Bernie Sanders analysis, even if many didn’t see him as the vehicle to any resolution.

    Americans (of the left) were brimming with suggestions for changing their political system to make it more responsive to majority concerns, but don’t see a viable route to bring change about and are being pushed onto the defensive by the distraction of the (futile) cultural wars the right are trying to stoke up.
  • Scott_xP said:

    EXC: Suella Braverman has been cut out of immigration reform planning as PM prepares to relax rules. Tory MPs with concerns about local businesses being short-staffed have been told to go to the CO & BEIS rather than the Home Office in a snub to Braverman

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/20090866/home-sec-snubbed-immigration-reform/

    Moderates have accused Suella Braverman of freelancing on immigration policies and running her own leadership campaign inside the HO

    Source told The Sun: “It's clear that there is widespread frustration in gov with Suella’s freelancing. She's running a blatant leadership campaign but it’s having a destabilising effect on the gov. She needs to focus on the day job and stop her antics or she won’t last long."

    It's not just Liz, the whole government is not fit for purpose.
    Happily the number of reports of MPs realising this suggests that we are heading to a KT event quickly. When Cabinet Ministers are reported as being in the rebel camp you know its serious.

    Yesterday - an apocalyptic PMQs, a terrible tour of the tea rooms, and a combative 22 committee meeting with many reports of it being the worst ever attended. Plus the comedy stylings of JRM denouncing the BBC and the IMF for their impertinence of disagreeing with him.

    We are very clearly in the End Times.
  • darkagedarkage Posts: 4,746

    Scott_xP said:

    EXC: Suella Braverman has been cut out of immigration reform planning as PM prepares to relax rules. Tory MPs with concerns about local businesses being short-staffed have been told to go to the CO & BEIS rather than the Home Office in a snub to Braverman

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/20090866/home-sec-snubbed-immigration-reform/

    Moderates have accused Suella Braverman of freelancing on immigration policies and running her own leadership campaign inside the HO

    Source told The Sun: “It's clear that there is widespread frustration in gov with Suella’s freelancing. She's running a blatant leadership campaign but it’s having a destabilising effect on the gov. She needs to focus on the day job and stop her antics or she won’t last long."

    It's not just Liz, the whole government is not fit for purpose.
    The established model of 'competent government' was trashed by Boris Johnson in 2019, so we are in an age of "post-competence"; and Truss and Braverman are both symptoms of this problem.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739

    We are very clearly in the End Times.

    Extraordinary briefing from MPs after the 1922 committee tonight, all of it describing the mood ranging from terrible to abysmal. Sort of stuff you’d expect in a premiership in its dying days, after years, not in its second month.
    https://twitter.com/lewis_goodall/status/1580263120349450240


    These are the dying days of the Truss experiment. She is the only one who doesn't know it yet.
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,069
    edited October 2022
    IanB2 said:

    Mr. B2, perhaps it's down to outsourcing non-top jobs to places where factories and the like are cheaper to run, denying the work in the West, helping the East/Africa, but also (within Western nations) being relatively bad for the middle class?

    Yes, an alternative - or possibly complementary - hypothesis is that the combination of technology and so-called globalisation has exposed everyone to competition, which has driven down our worth, except for those in charge whose reach, and hence worth, has expanded.

    From the perspective of the real global poor, this is of course good news, because they are being slowly levelled with us.

    There have been prior periods in history when power and wealth has aggregated towards a small elite, and the eventual outcome has tended to be political turbulence, often of a violent nature.

    The ironic circularity is of course that such pressures are behind the origins of communism.

    Perhaps what is missing today is any sort of coherent ideology or alternative model (to globalistic capitalism - which has become proto-oligarchic) powerful enough to be both credible and around which modern revolutionaries (and voters) can gather?
    With Communism discredited there are other emerging alternatives to capitalist consumerism. One is Islamism and other hardline religious tyranny, anther is Green radicalism. Neither are strong enough to take power here, but both have the opportunity to be radically disruptive.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,575

    If The Queen Consort wears it then it is an insult to over a billion people and the fact the the Royal Family don't give a shit about their bloody colonial past.

    Plans for Queen Camilla to be honoured with a crown containing the Koh-i-Noor diamond at the coronation next year could be dropped because of “political sensitivities”, it was claimed yesterday...

    And in that context, it looks as though the India trade deal is now off.

    Though that's more to do with Braverman complaining about Indian visitors who overstay their visas.

  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739
    'You can't want growth and criticise every measure that drives growth' says Foreign secretary James Cleverly.

    He adds that change can be unsettling and cause a market reaction, but it is necessary to grow the economy.

    https://trib.al/Rx0iR33

    📺 Sky 501 and YouTube https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1580445460950822912/video/1
  • HeathenerHeathener Posts: 5,097
    Nigelb said:

    If The Queen Consort wears it then it is an insult to over a billion people and the fact the the Royal Family don't give a shit about their bloody colonial past.

    Plans for Queen Camilla to be honoured with a crown containing the Koh-i-Noor diamond at the coronation next year could be dropped because of “political sensitivities”, it was claimed yesterday...

    And in that context, it looks as though the India trade deal is now off.

    Though that's more to do with Braverman complaining about Indian visitors who overstay their visas.

    Yep she has really pissed them off.

    Quite bizarre really. Almost the only benefit to Brexit was the theoretical ability to trade freely outside of the EU. Boris Johnson got that. Now the Truss-Braverman Gov't appeared to have screwed it up.

    I liked that tweet that "Suella Braverman is what you get when you feed Priti Patel after midnight" :smiley:
  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,084
    edited October 2022
    Scott_xP said:

    The origin of our current malaise was the Brexit referendum. Charitably, it was a risky bet on a radical shift in our long-established and reasonably successful economic and geopolitical model and the bet has been lost. What we are seeing now is government by sunk-cost fallacy.

    https://twitter.com/ProfBrianCox/status/1580343794095955969
    https://twitter.com/LBC/status/1580259735114219539

    I’d see that more as a symptom, which has made things worse, in the same way as the American right - supported by very many on the wrong end of the current economic settlement - is putting forward people and propositions that will do nothing to alleviate the problem and in most cases are or would make things worse.

    History demonstrates that voting for (or revolting in support of) extreme people or solutions typically damages everyone, with the chance to build a better world sometimes (but certainly not always) only emerging from the ashes of terrible experience. What we need is a shortcut to the latter that avoids the intervening apocalypse that only Leon would enjoy.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,575
    Great interview with a small business owner on Today a bit earlier on.

    Being asked about the problems of business, and what government needs to do to help, she just answered "Truss must go, now". Which seemed (oddly) unexpected, as the interview was immediately truncated.
  • DavidLDavidL Posts: 50,772
    rcs1000 said:

    FPT:

    Pagan2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pagan2 said:

    What annoys me reading tonight is that all the blame for where we are is being put on truss and kwasi. Have they made things worse certainly they have and I have no liking for either.

    However where we are is the end point of 30 odd years of centrist social democratic style governement. It has left millions in this country unable to live despite working 40 hours a week without having to rely on governement handouts or food banks or both.

    Most of that time spent within the EU before anyone goes yeah but brexit. Centrist governments have failed a lot of people in this country while companies and their directors made out like bandits. The difference now is it is beginning to hit people on this board most of whom weren't in those bottom cohorts so now you are starting to cry and whine about it.

    Welcome to the poorhouse you deserve it.

    Forget Brexit.

    What is it you propose?

    Where is prospering, and what policies have they implemented that are appropriate for the UK?

    And there are two massive headwinds you need to at the very least acknowledge.

    Firstly, there's demographics.
    Secondly, there's all the people in the world - and we're not talking immigrants - who are prepared to do your job for less.

    I don't believe anywhere in the west is prospering when you consider the life of the median citizen, they are finding housing costs rising, tax rising,energy price rising and food rising all more than their pay over the last 3 to 4 decades. All the west has been doing the social democratic lie of we can have more and more public services but not raise tax and funded it through borrowing. UK, germany, france etc.

    Time to be realistic. We need to fund those public services we consider essential properly. We need to stop putting the cost of that on generations unborn. What we cant fund we need to tell people I am sorry we cant fund that and cut it.

    I laid out the 5 tenets of where I come from.

    Personally I prefer a small state but the 5 principles I think is where we need to be before we even talk about small state vs big state....fiscal stability
    I wrote a piece of research about six or seven years ago which said pretty much the same thing:

    For much of the post war period, developed countries – and their citizens – had it pretty good.

    Unemployment was negligible, crime low, and each generation successively richer. A German, Japanese or American father could look down on his children and feel confident that their lives would be better than his.

    But then something changed. The children of the 2000s ceased being wealthier than their parents. And while incomes had apparently risen, so had the prices of petrol, of energy and of rent. While families of the 1970s could survive - or even prosper – with one working parent, it now required two. Young people were leaving college with ever larger amounts of debt and failing to find the kind of
    secure, well paid jobs their father’s had.

    We see these trends wherever we look. Take the US, generally considered (by us in Europe at least) to have been the most successful developed economy in the world in the recent past. According to the US Federal Reserve, real median household income is down almost 10% since peaking in 1999.

    That’s an unprecedented reduction, and is all the more shocking in the context of a country where headline GDP growth has been relatively strong.
    That reduction is an inevitable consequence of the unprecedented competition faced by the low to medium skilled from the development of what were previously third world countries, specifically China. The massive increase in global trade simply left those groups, which contain the majority of the population, with no negotiating power. If they don't like the lower wages the factory was transplanted and minimal tariffs meant that the business could still produce its product for the market in the US or the EU.

    This is the same problem we had with the SM writ large. It was of course possible for us to thrive in the SM, as Germany did, but it would have needed a completely different policy mix from governments who almost certainly would not have been re-elected.

    Simplistic, idealistic notions of the benefits of free trade, low or non existent tariffs have completely undermined the majority of western society. Those with capital or with exceptional skills at the top have, of course, gained massively and we have seen GDP creep up, usually with increasing trade deficits as we import much of what we used to make.
  • bondegezoubondegezou Posts: 7,168
    Scott_xP said:

    'You can't want growth and criticise every measure that drives growth' says Foreign secretary James Cleverly.

    He adds that change can be unsettling and cause a market reaction, but it is necessary to grow the economy.

    https://trib.al/Rx0iR33

    📺 Sky 501 and YouTube https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1580445460950822912/video/1

    They’re still not making, or are unable to make, the argument as to how their supposed pro-growth measures will actually lead to growth. There’s just this mantra that you are either for growth or against growth… but “for growth” actually means “support hardline libertarian tax-cutting that is ruining the economy and depressing growth”.

    If the Trussites want to continue in power, they need to win the argument. But the argument they need to win is not growth vs. not growth, it’s how will tax cuts funded by borrowing deliver growth. Does anyone here think they understand that?
  • Scott_xP said:

    'You can't want growth and criticise every measure that drives growth' says Foreign secretary James Cleverly.

    He adds that change can be unsettling and cause a market reaction, but it is necessary to grow the economy.

    https://trib.al/Rx0iR33

    📺 Sky 501 and YouTube https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1580445460950822912/video/1

    Of course you can when everything it is doing is sabotaging the economy. I almost feel sorry for Cleverley and even Truss herself. Your whole political career leads you to this point where in his case he has to argue for stupid knowing he looks like a berk. Thats his cabinet career right there, not leading grand changes to the fabric of society, talking bollocks on the Telly.

    And Truss? She is painfully out of her depth and is to be very publicly humiliated and laughed out of office. That's a hard gig even when its self-inflicted.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,771
    Last exert from my (now six or seven year old piece...):

    In his magisterial history of the seventeenth century, Global Crisis, Geoffrey Parker explains how an exogenous shock – in that case the little ice age – resulted in a series of uprisings across the globe. The people, instead of realising the climate was to blame for falling crop yields (and therefore poverty and death), instead fixed their eyes up on the elites, and the existing social structure. The result was a century of revolutions, revolts, uprisings and wars.
  • eristdooferistdoof Posts: 4,861
    rcs1000 said:

    FPT:

    Pagan2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pagan2 said:

    What annoys me reading tonight is that all the blame for where we are is being put on truss and kwasi. Have they made things worse certainly they have and I have no liking for either.

    However where we are is the end point of 30 odd years of centrist social democratic style governement. It has left millions in this country unable to live despite working 40 hours a week without having to rely on governement handouts or food banks or both.

    Most of that time spent within the EU before anyone goes yeah but brexit. Centrist governments have failed a lot of people in this country while companies and their directors made out like bandits. The difference now is it is beginning to hit people on this board most of whom weren't in those bottom cohorts so now you are starting to cry and whine about it.

    Welcome to the poorhouse you deserve it.

    Forget Brexit.

    What is it you propose?

    Where is prospering, and what policies have they implemented that are appropriate for the UK?

    And there are two massive headwinds you need to at the very least acknowledge.

    Firstly, there's demographics.
    Secondly, there's all the people in the world - and we're not talking immigrants - who are prepared to do your job for less.

    I don't believe anywhere in the west is prospering when you consider the life of the median citizen, they are finding housing costs rising, tax rising,energy price rising and food rising all more than their pay over the last 3 to 4 decades. All the west has been doing the social democratic lie of we can have more and more public services but not raise tax and funded it through borrowing. UK, germany, france etc.

    Time to be realistic. We need to fund those public services we consider essential properly. We need to stop putting the cost of that on generations unborn. What we cant fund we need to tell people I am sorry we cant fund that and cut it.

    I laid out the 5 tenets of where I come from.

    Personally I prefer a small state but the 5 principles I think is where we need to be before we even talk about small state vs big state....fiscal stability
    I wrote a piece of research about six or seven years ago which said pretty much the same thing:

    For much of the post war period, developed countries – and their citizens – had it pretty good.

    Unemployment was negligible, crime low, and each generation successively richer. A German, Japanese or American father could look down on his children and feel confident that their lives would be better than his.

    But then something changed. The children of the 2000s ceased being wealthier than their parents. And while incomes had apparently risen, so had the prices of petrol, of energy and of rent. While families of the 1970s could survive - or even prosper – with one working parent, it now required two. Young people were leaving college with ever larger amounts of debt and failing to find the kind of
    secure, well paid jobs their father’s had.

    We see these trends wherever we look. Take the US, generally considered (by us in Europe at least) to have been the most successful developed economy in the world in the recent past. According to the US Federal Reserve, real median household income is down almost 10% since peaking in 1999.

    That’s an unprecedented reduction, and is all the more shocking in the context of a country where headline GDP growth has been relatively strong.
    "While families of the 1970s could survive - or even prosper – with one working parent, it now required two."

    There is a type of multiplayer Prisoner's Dilemma here. For an individual family it is better when two adults work rather than one. But because most people choose to take the action that improves their personal lot, the overall effect on society is negative. Over time it becomes more or less necessary for both adults to work. A concrete example is allowing the size of a mortgage to be assessed using joint incomes rather than just one income. It allows one family with two working parents to buy a bigger house, but over a 20 year time scale the benefits have just been swallowed up by house price inflation.
  • rcs1000rcs1000 Posts: 53,771
    edited October 2022
    DavidL said:

    rcs1000 said:

    FPT:

    Pagan2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pagan2 said:

    What annoys me reading tonight is that all the blame for where we are is being put on truss and kwasi. Have they made things worse certainly they have and I have no liking for either.

    However where we are is the end point of 30 odd years of centrist social democratic style governement. It has left millions in this country unable to live despite working 40 hours a week without having to rely on governement handouts or food banks or both.

    Most of that time spent within the EU before anyone goes yeah but brexit. Centrist governments have failed a lot of people in this country while companies and their directors made out like bandits. The difference now is it is beginning to hit people on this board most of whom weren't in those bottom cohorts so now you are starting to cry and whine about it.

    Welcome to the poorhouse you deserve it.

    Forget Brexit.

    What is it you propose?

    Where is prospering, and what policies have they implemented that are appropriate for the UK?

    And there are two massive headwinds you need to at the very least acknowledge.

    Firstly, there's demographics.
    Secondly, there's all the people in the world - and we're not talking immigrants - who are prepared to do your job for less.

    I don't believe anywhere in the west is prospering when you consider the life of the median citizen, they are finding housing costs rising, tax rising,energy price rising and food rising all more than their pay over the last 3 to 4 decades. All the west has been doing the social democratic lie of we can have more and more public services but not raise tax and funded it through borrowing. UK, germany, france etc.

    Time to be realistic. We need to fund those public services we consider essential properly. We need to stop putting the cost of that on generations unborn. What we cant fund we need to tell people I am sorry we cant fund that and cut it.

    I laid out the 5 tenets of where I come from.

    Personally I prefer a small state but the 5 principles I think is where we need to be before we even talk about small state vs big state....fiscal stability
    I wrote a piece of research about six or seven years ago which said pretty much the same thing:

    For much of the post war period, developed countries – and their citizens – had it pretty good.

    Unemployment was negligible, crime low, and each generation successively richer. A German, Japanese or American father could look down on his children and feel confident that their lives would be better than his.

    But then something changed. The children of the 2000s ceased being wealthier than their parents. And while incomes had apparently risen, so had the prices of petrol, of energy and of rent. While families of the 1970s could survive - or even prosper – with one working parent, it now required two. Young people were leaving college with ever larger amounts of debt and failing to find the kind of
    secure, well paid jobs their father’s had.

    We see these trends wherever we look. Take the US, generally considered (by us in Europe at least) to have been the most successful developed economy in the world in the recent past. According to the US Federal Reserve, real median household income is down almost 10% since peaking in 1999.

    That’s an unprecedented reduction, and is all the more shocking in the context of a country where headline GDP growth has been relatively strong.
    That reduction is an inevitable consequence of the unprecedented competition faced by the low to medium skilled from the development of what were previously third world countries, specifically China. The massive increase in global trade simply left those groups, which contain the majority of the population, with no negotiating power. If they don't like the lower wages the factory was transplanted and minimal tariffs meant that the business could still produce its product for the market in the US or the EU.

    This is the same problem we had with the SM writ large. It was of course possible for us to thrive in the SM, as Germany did, but it would have needed a completely different policy mix from governments who almost certainly would not have been re-elected.

    Simplistic, idealistic notions of the benefits of free trade, low or non existent tariffs have completely undermined the majority of western society. Those with capital or with exceptional skills at the top have, of course, gained massively and we have seen GDP creep up, usually with increasing trade deficits as we import much of what we used to make.
    We have heard this song before of course. Between the First and Second World Wars, following the US passing of The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, a wave of protectionist measures were passed around the wold. This did not end well: world trade collapsed, and economies – that had been recovering – deteriorated further. The raising of tariff barriers around the world was one of the ultimate causes of the Second World War; something recognised in the creation of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947, which went on to become the World Trade Organisation in 1995.

    World Trade 1929-1933, as % of World GDP


    Source: League of Nations’ World Economic Survey 1932-33

    It is true that the benefits of free trade appear very unequal: to an unemployed steel worker in Sunderland, the 1% in his country have gotten wealthier, as have the people of China and other emerging markets, while he has found himself without a job. The problem is that the proposed alternatives – of erecting tariff barriers – make the problem worse.

    Raising tariff barriers on – say – imported steel to maintain jobs in Redcar or Port Talbot won’t save those jobs. Or, if it temporarily does, it will do so at the expense of the steel consumers of the UK – car makers and the like.

    But let us imagine this issue could be solved (and that we could avoid retaliatory tariffs from those affected by our actions): who would be the purchaser of manufactured products from us if we attempted to protect our industries? We would be making a conscious decision to produce goods at above world market prices. And we need our exports: because without exports of goods and services, we cannot afford the natural gas and oil and the like we need.

    As we discussed in Why We Were Rich, above, the developed world used to have the monopoly on manufacturing goods. It no longer does. Attempting to protect industries that are no longer competitive will not help them, it will merely unbalance economies further. Recognising this is painful. Not recognising it is worse.
  • Have just noticed. The video of Truss meeting the King. Lots of comments about her appalling courtesy thing. And his "you're back again? Dear oh dear". But listen between "again" and "dear". He grimaces and sucks his teeth loudly. Its comedy gold!

    https://twitter.com/chrisshipitv/status/1580264025648431105
  • darkagedarkage Posts: 4,746
    edited October 2022
    Nigelb said:

    If The Queen Consort wears it then it is an insult to over a billion people and the fact the the Royal Family don't give a shit about their bloody colonial past.

    Plans for Queen Camilla to be honoured with a crown containing the Koh-i-Noor diamond at the coronation next year could be dropped because of “political sensitivities”, it was claimed yesterday...

    And in that context, it looks as though the India trade deal is now off.

    Though that's more to do with Braverman complaining about Indian visitors who overstay their visas.

    Is 'the deal' actually off?
    I wonder what exactly Braverman expects the Indian government to do about visa overstayers? It is a problem for the enforcement team in the Home Office. This seems to be in line with the Brexiteer tradition of blaming other people/countries for our own failures. The Conservatives have run out of ideas, and people are now tired of hearing from them.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739
    “The Conservative benches have reached the point where they hate one another more than they care about electoral defeat. Acidity levels make normal politics near-impossible.“

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/quentin-letts-defeated-silence-was-all-her-mps-could-muster-h0kxkn6bz
  • MarqueeMarkMarqueeMark Posts: 49,959

    Have just noticed. The video of Truss meeting the King. Lots of comments about her appalling courtesy thing. And his "you're back again? Dear oh dear". But listen between "again" and "dear". He grimaces and sucks his teeth loudly. Its comedy gold!

    https://twitter.com/chrisshipitv/status/1580264025648431105

    He should write a letter to the 22....

    If the monarch clearly thinks his Prime Minister is a joke, then for all those Conservative MPs who consider themselves a royalist, time to act.
  • Casino_RoyaleCasino_Royale Posts: 55,019
    rcs1000 said:

    (Almost) final exert from The Discontented:

    To understand our current predicament, we need to first understand where we came from. Growing up in the post war period in the developed world was like winning the lottery: you were a member of the global 1% by accident of birth. The reason the developed world was so well off is that it had learned the secret of manufacturing, and it was where all the capital (in terms of machines that made things) had been deployed.

    Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the developed world exported manufactured products and services, while the developing world (including China) exported raw materials. This relationship was very good for workers in rich economies, as they were the bottleneck in world economic production. The producers of raw materials – say Brazil and China for iron ore, and the Middle East and Nigeria for oil – were poor, and the makers of cars were rich.

    This began to change with the emergence of the tiger economies in the late 1980s and 1990s: Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kong. Entrepreneurs in these countries realised that they had something that the old world did not - plentiful, cheap, labour – and that buying capital goods from Germany or Japan enabled them to compete on the world stage.

    Where these small countries led, China and others are now following. China – which just 20 years ago was an exporter of coal, oil and various other commodities – is now a manufacturing powerhouse and commodity importer. The developed world’s core competence, turning raw materials into manufactured products, was taken away from them.

    The Three Pillars of Discontent
    The symptoms then are clear: the traditional growth driver of the developed world is behind it, and we suffer from stagnant GDP and rising inequality. But the cause of the ultimate disease is more complicated than just China learned to manufacture things. Indeed, we see three long-term drivers behind the developed world’s malaise: demographics, commodities and globalisation.

    Demographics, commodities and globalisation are the answer, and there are no easy answers to fix them.

    Demographics needs tweaking for more childcare, and fewer retirement years. Commodities by making more efficient use of existing resources/fewer resources. And on globalisation we need to row back a bit.

    But, I don't see any easy paths to get to 2.5-3.5% growth pa again, unless there is an epoch defining technological breakthrough in the West alone.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,043
    Scott_xP said:

    “The Conservative benches have reached the point where they hate one another more than they care about electoral defeat. Acidity levels make normal politics near-impossible.“

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/quentin-letts-defeated-silence-was-all-her-mps-could-muster-h0kxkn6bz

    Time for opposition to sort themselves out.

  • Heathener said:

    I really like from @MikeSmithson:

    "Essentially she has over-reached herself."

    A straightforward but devastating summary.

    That was the restrained but devastating conclusion of NickP too - 'out of her depth'.
  • Cicero said:

    rcs1000 said:

    FPT:

    Pagan2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pagan2 said:

    What annoys me reading tonight is that all the blame for where we are is being put on truss and kwasi. Have they made things worse certainly they have and I have no liking for either.

    However where we are is the end point of 30 odd years of centrist social democratic style governement. It has left millions in this country unable to live despite working 40 hours a week without having to rely on governement handouts or food banks or both.

    Most of that time spent within the EU before anyone goes yeah but brexit. Centrist governments have failed a lot of people in this country while companies and their directors made out like bandits. The difference now is it is beginning to hit people on this board most of whom weren't in those bottom cohorts so now you are starting to cry and whine about it.

    Welcome to the poorhouse you deserve it.

    Forget Brexit.

    What is it you propose?

    Where is prospering, and what policies have they implemented that are appropriate for the UK?

    And there are two massive headwinds you need to at the very least acknowledge.

    Firstly, there's demographics.
    Secondly, there's all the people in the world - and we're not talking immigrants - who are prepared to do your job for less.

    I don't believe anywhere in the west is prospering when you consider the life of the median citizen, they are finding housing costs rising, tax rising,energy price rising and food rising all more than their pay over the last 3 to 4 decades. All the west has been doing the social democratic lie of we can have more and more public services but not raise tax and funded it through borrowing. UK, germany, france etc.

    Time to be realistic. We need to fund those public services we consider essential properly. We need to stop putting the cost of that on generations unborn. What we cant fund we need to tell people I am sorry we cant fund that and cut it.

    I laid out the 5 tenets of where I come from.

    Personally I prefer a small state but the 5 principles I think is where we need to be before we even talk about small state vs big state....fiscal stability
    I wrote a piece of research about six or seven years ago which said pretty much the same thing:

    For much of the post war period, developed countries – and their citizens – had it pretty good.

    Unemployment was negligible, crime low, and each generation successively richer. A German, Japanese or American father could look down on his children and feel confident that their lives would be better than his.

    But then something changed. The children of the 2000s ceased being wealthier than their parents. And while incomes had apparently risen, so had the prices of petrol, of energy and of rent. While families of the 1970s could survive - or even prosper – with one working parent, it now required two. Young people were leaving college with ever larger amounts of debt and failing to find the kind of
    secure, well paid jobs their father’s had.

    We see these trends wherever we look. Take the US, generally considered (by us in Europe at least) to have been the most successful developed economy in the world in the recent past. According to the US Federal Reserve, real median household income is down almost 10% since peaking in 1999.

    That’s an unprecedented reduction, and is all the more shocking in the context of a country where headline GDP growth has been relatively strong.
    Three UK structural observations:

    1) As the rewards for employment have fallen, the returns on capital have increased dramatically (especially true in the USA btw)

    2) Income is taxed very heavily, capital is taxed relatively lightly and land not taxed at all.

    3) The efficiency of government spending has collapsed as public services are no longer controlled by the taxpayer.

    These problems date at least to the end of the 1960s.

    Major reforms of employment are needed, including promoting self employment and small businesses. A major shift in the tax system is needed including an increase in wealth and capital taxes and a sharp reduction of the income tax burden. Major administrative reform is needed, including radical decentralization and a simplification of the role of the state.

    At 10 million words, the UK still has the longest tax code in the world. Aiming to cut that would be a massive task, but the fiscal burden of administration is most definitely "anti-growth". We need a whole new approach, but our politics doesn´t even understand the question. Hence in order to address the economic crisis, we need to address the failures of our politics.

    There can be no prosperity without reform.
    Democratic governments and politicians focus too much on growth and GDP. The real positive changes governments can make to an economy are delivered over a 10-30 year horizon so there is little incentive for those to be implemented. The kind of short term fixes they choose instead generally just delay and worsen problems for us in the medium and long term. So just do sensible and boring on the economy if we can't do the long term investment stuff (what Truss is suggesting is in no way long term investment even if she uses that rhetoric to justify enriching her client voters).

    Beyond the economy and keeping people safe is there anything obvious that western governments can do? Promote health and fitness at an individual level seems an easy win. People who are healthier feel happier just like people who are wealthier. People who are fitter are more productive workers and cost the state less in healthcare. Small changes in millions of peoples routines can make massive changes to their outlook, and real progess can be made over a 4 or 5 year electoral cycle.

  • darkagedarkage Posts: 4,746

    Scott_xP said:

    'You can't want growth and criticise every measure that drives growth' says Foreign secretary James Cleverly.

    He adds that change can be unsettling and cause a market reaction, but it is necessary to grow the economy.

    https://trib.al/Rx0iR33

    📺 Sky 501 and YouTube https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1580445460950822912/video/1

    Of course you can when everything it is doing is sabotaging the economy. I almost feel sorry for Cleverley and even Truss herself. Your whole political career leads you to this point where in his case he has to argue for stupid knowing he looks like a berk. Thats his cabinet career right there, not leading grand changes to the fabric of society, talking bollocks on the Telly.

    And Truss? She is painfully out of her depth and is to be very publicly humiliated and laughed out of office. That's a hard gig even when its self-inflicted.
    Truss has three options. 1, to go for a general election on her growth plans; 2, to resign for personal reasons; 3, to limp on Theresa May style. I think that 3 is the most likely outcome, until such point as it becomes untenable. If Tory MP's do nothing other than moan to the press, then we get 3, by default - I think it is the most likely outcome, about 50% against 25% for the other two options. For how long will she limp on? I've no idea but the precedent is that Tory MP's wont act and they won't be able to agree how to act when they do. It is a party in a complete death spiral and it will ultimately be Europe that ruined them, as this all goes back to not being able to think past 'getting Brexit done'.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,043
    “The markets are looking for a steady hand and some reassurance,” he says. “But unfortunately, [Tuesday] night’s comments by Bailey suggest that the Bank’s hand is starting to shake.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/10/13/bank-england-risks-continuing-supply-cheap-money-back-door/
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739
    Just 36 hours ago Stephen Hammond became the first Tory MP in public to suggest abandoning a key tax cut in a @skynews interview. 1 out of 356.

    This morning it seems this view it's positively fashionable, as dozens follow suit https://twitter.com/samcoatessky/status/1579912033562398720
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,043

    Heathener said:

    I really like from @MikeSmithson:

    "Essentially she has over-reached herself."

    A straightforward but devastating summary.

    That was the restrained but devastating conclusion of NickP too - 'out of her depth'.
    It is the most outstanding example of the Peter Principle in modern times.

  • IanB2IanB2 Posts: 47,084
    edited October 2022
    rcs1000 said:

    maxh said:

    IanB2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    FPT:

    Pagan2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pagan2 said:

    What annoys me reading tonight is that all the blame for where we are is being put on truss and kwasi. Have they made things worse certainly they have and I have no liking for either.

    However where we are is the end point of 30 odd years of centrist social democratic style governement. It has left millions in this country unable to live despite working 40 hours a week without having to rely on governement handouts or food banks or both.

    Most of that time spent within the EU before anyone goes yeah but brexit. Centrist governments have failed a lot of people in this country while companies and their directors made out like bandits. The difference now is it is beginning to hit people on this board most of whom weren't in those bottom cohorts so now you are starting to cry and whine about it.

    Welcome to the poorhouse you deserve it.

    Forget Brexit.

    What is it you propose?

    Where is prospering, and what policies have they implemented that are appropriate for the UK?

    And there are two massive headwinds you need to at the very least acknowledge.

    Firstly, there's demographics.
    Secondly, there's all the people in the world - and we're not talking immigrants - who are prepared to do your job for less.

    I don't believe anywhere in the west is prospering when you consider the life of the median citizen, they are finding housing costs rising, tax rising,energy price rising and food rising all more than their pay over the last 3 to 4 decades. All the west has been doing the social democratic lie of we can have more and more public services but not raise tax and funded it through borrowing. UK, germany, france etc.

    Time to be realistic. We need to fund those public services we consider essential properly. We need to stop putting the cost of that on generations unborn. What we cant fund we need to tell people I am sorry we cant fund that and cut it.

    I laid out the 5 tenets of where I come from.

    Personally I prefer a small state but the 5 principles I think is where we need to be before we even talk about small state vs big state....fiscal stability
    I wrote a piece of research about six or seven years ago which said pretty much the same thing:

    For much of the post war period, developed countries – and their citizens – had it pretty good.

    Unemployment was negligible, crime low, and each generation successively richer. A German, Japanese or American father could look down on his children and feel confident that their lives would be better than his.

    But then something changed. The children of the 2000s ceased being wealthier than their parents. And while incomes had apparently risen, so had the prices of petrol, of energy and of rent. While families of the 1970s could survive - or even prosper – with one working parent, it now required two. Young people were leaving college with ever larger amounts of debt and failing to find the kind of
    secure, well paid jobs their father’s had.

    We see these trends wherever we look. Take the US, generally considered (by us in Europe at least) to have been the most successful developed economy in the world in the recent past. According to the US Federal Reserve, real median household income is down almost 10% since peaking in 1999.

    That’s an unprecedented reduction, and is all the more shocking in the context of a country where headline GDP growth has been relatively strong.
    The story in the US - replicated to a lesser extent around the rest of the developed world - is that the benefits of that growth have been appropriated mostly by a small group of the rich and powerful, and hence denied from the rest of us.


    I do wonder whether the hypothesis that the
    fall of communism removed the imperative to demonstrate the superiority of capitalism through sharing the benefits of growth more widely, because the potential alternative to capitalism had been defeated and the potential threat to the powerful of revolution went away, has something to it.
    Really interesting thread, thanks pagan for starting it. I’m surprised by the diagnosis of centrist government as the source of the problem, though. To me the source is really quite simple - shareholder capitalism prioritising dividends and short term profit over investment.

    The solution, in my view, is some form of stakeholder capitalism. Employees, customers and local communities (ie those with a long term interest in the growth of a business) owning as large a stake in that business as economically possible.

    I don’t think it’s government that is the problem, though I agree with other parts of your diagnosis.
    The fundamental problem is cognitive dissonance.

    Everyone starts from their conclusion (immigrants, China, shareholder capitalism, social democratic government) and works out how that is the key driver behind stagnant incomes.
    That reflects the lack of a cogent outcome from the much excellent academic and political analysis of our current travails that is already out there, for the curious. It is all diagnosis and no treatment.
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,043
    Anyone else getting seriously worried that a PM who is so clearly out of her depth but also blinkered, is going to guide us through the worst winter crisis since the 1970s?

  • Anyone else getting seriously worried that a PM who is so clearly out of her depth but also blinkered, is going to guide us through the worst winter crisis since the 1970s?

    We have to select a new PM for autumn first before we start wondering who will replace them for the winter.
  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614
    rcs1000 said:

    FPT:

    Pagan2 said:

    rcs1000 said:

    Pagan2 said:

    What annoys me reading tonight is that all the blame for where we are is being put on truss and kwasi. Have they made things worse certainly they have and I have no liking for either.

    However where we are is the end point of 30 odd years of centrist social democratic style governement. It has left millions in this country unable to live despite working 40 hours a week without having to rely on governement handouts or food banks or both.

    Most of that time spent within the EU before anyone goes yeah but brexit. Centrist governments have failed a lot of people in this country while companies and their directors made out like bandits. The difference now is it is beginning to hit people on this board most of whom weren't in those bottom cohorts so now you are starting to cry and whine about it.

    Welcome to the poorhouse you deserve it.

    Forget Brexit.

    What is it you propose?

    Where is prospering, and what policies have they implemented that are appropriate for the UK?

    And there are two massive headwinds you need to at the very least acknowledge.

    Firstly, there's demographics.
    Secondly, there's all the people in the world - and we're not talking immigrants - who are prepared to do your job for less.

    I don't believe anywhere in the west is prospering when you consider the life of the median citizen, they are finding housing costs rising, tax rising,energy price rising and food rising all more than their pay over the last 3 to 4 decades. All the west has been doing the social democratic lie of we can have more and more public services but not raise tax and funded it through borrowing. UK, germany, france etc.

    Time to be realistic. We need to fund those public services we consider essential properly. We need to stop putting the cost of that on generations unborn. What we cant fund we need to tell people I am sorry we cant fund that and cut it.

    I laid out the 5 tenets of where I come from.

    Personally I prefer a small state but the 5 principles I think is where we need to be before we even talk about small state vs big state....fiscal stability
    I wrote a piece of research about six or seven years ago which said pretty much the same thing:

    For much of the post war period, developed countries – and their citizens – had it pretty good.

    Unemployment was negligible, crime low, and each generation successively richer. A German, Japanese or American father could look down on his children and feel confident that their lives would be better than his.

    But then something changed. The children of the 2000s ceased being wealthier than their parents. And while incomes had apparently risen, so had the prices of petrol, of energy and of rent. While families of the 1970s could survive - or even prosper – with one working parent, it now required two. Young people were leaving college with ever larger amounts of debt and failing to find the kind of
    secure, well paid jobs their father’s had.

    We see these trends wherever we look. Take the US, generally considered (by us in Europe at least) to have been the most successful developed economy in the world in the recent past. According to the US Federal Reserve, real median household income is down almost 10% since peaking in 1999.

    That’s an unprecedented reduction, and is all the more shocking in the context of a country where headline GDP growth has been relatively strong.
    Good piece, but you really didn’t write “…secure, well paid jobs their father’s had”, did you?
  • rottenboroughrottenborough Posts: 58,043

    Anyone else getting seriously worried that a PM who is so clearly out of her depth but also blinkered, is going to guide us through the worst winter crisis since the 1970s?

    We have to select a new PM for autumn first before we start wondering who will replace them for the winter.
    LOL.

  • SandpitSandpit Posts: 49,614

    “The markets are looking for a steady hand and some reassurance,” he says. “But unfortunately, [Tuesday] night’s comments by Bailey suggest that the Bank’s hand is starting to shake.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/10/13/bank-england-risks-continuing-supply-cheap-money-back-door/

    Bailey is making an idiot of himself here.
  • sbjme19sbjme19 Posts: 113
    Cleverly.....most of the Ministers could just leave a recording which just said "growth growth, Putin Ukraine, all countries experiencing the same" and save themselves the embarrassment of an actual appearance. Except perhaps for Braverman and Mogg who might go off on one and say something original and helpful.......to Labour.
  • Luckyguy1983Luckyguy1983 Posts: 25,047
    edited October 2022
    I don't see how the UK benefits greatly from an India trade deal. We already import wonderful goods at a very low price, and certainly a fairly free market in services also seems to exist. I stand to be educated. At any rate, Camilla should wear the crown; these matters should not be dictated by foreign governments.
  • NigelbNigelb Posts: 61,575
    .

    Heathener said:

    I really like from @MikeSmithson:

    "Essentially she has over-reached herself."

    A straightforward but devastating summary.

    That was the restrained but devastating conclusion of NickP too - 'out of her depth'.
    Or Attlee - "Afraid you're not up to it".
  • dixiedeandixiedean Posts: 27,837

    Anyone else getting seriously worried that a PM who is so clearly out of her depth but also blinkered, is going to guide us through the worst winter crisis since the 1970s?

    "Guide" is a pretty strong word for point in one direction over a cliff and everyone go the opposite.
  • Scott_xPScott_xP Posts: 32,739
    Truss silences critics as Tories surge and Labour nosedive to 29-point lead in latest Times/YouGov poll

    CON 23 (+1)
    LAB 51 (-1)
    LIB DEM 9 (=)
    GREEN 7 (+1)
    REFORM 3 (-2)

    Fieldwork 11/12 October https://twitter.com/patrickkmaguire/status/1580453294258163712/photo/1
  • TazTaz Posts: 10,704

    Anyone else getting seriously worried that a PM who is so clearly out of her depth but also blinkered, is going to guide us through the worst winter crisis since the 1970s?

    It is inevitable.

    It will be what it will be. Pointless worrying about it.
  • AlistairMAlistairM Posts: 2,004
    In some good news it appears that there were only a very limited number of Russian missile or kamikaze drone attacks overnight. Certainly no indication of them being able to keep up the bombardment of a few nights ago.
  • Anyone else getting seriously worried that a PM who is so clearly out of her depth but also blinkered, is going to guide us through the worst winter crisis since the 1970s?

    I posted earlier that we are in the end times, and we truly are. But there are multiple elements at play! @darkage pulled out the three scenarios and "limp on Theresa May style" is clearly what her team want. Remember that May failed to limp on, but even if the same is true for Truss she doesn't need to be around long for this to utterly destroy her.

    The elephant in the room is that the energy crisis is still live. We don't have enough generating capacity now, and if Russia sabotages supply / transmission then that is even more of a problem.

    KT insist that they have fixed the problem. Nobody will face unpayable bills (deluded), nobody will have to ration power (laughable) and anyone talking down Britain is in the anti-growth coalition and an agent of Putin.

    Boris would have done the whole wartime spirit thing, pull together, we'll get through. Truss is sneering and insisting there is nothing to pull together for. That will end very very badly if the winter gets cold. How can they not see this?
  • FoxyFoxy Posts: 44,069
    Sandpit said:

    “The markets are looking for a steady hand and some reassurance,” he says. “But unfortunately, [Tuesday] night’s comments by Bailey suggest that the Bank’s hand is starting to shake.”

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/10/13/bank-england-risks-continuing-supply-cheap-money-back-door/

    Bailey is making an idiot of himself here.
    Chosen by Boris for his Brexit position, the gift that keeps on giving.
  • TazTaz Posts: 10,704
    Scott_xP said:

    Just 36 hours ago Stephen Hammond became the first Tory MP in public to suggest abandoning a key tax cut in a @skynews interview. 1 out of 356.

    This morning it seems this view it's positively fashionable, as dozens follow suit https://twitter.com/samcoatessky/status/1579912033562398720

    If Truss rolls back on her main flagship policies, as she is doing, then what is the point of her or her premiership ?

    She is, to quote, in office but not in power.
This discussion has been closed.