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@crucial said in British Politics:
The funniest thing is that many imagine that Britain is negotiating from either a position of strength, or at least on equal terms. That is, and was always going to be, a dream. The EU hold the cards.
The EU has made it clear it doesn't want the UK to leave. It will lose the UK's financial contribution and the risk of a low-tax, low tariff, Singapore-style economy (if the UK went down that route ) attracting business would probably terrify them. They are just as keen for a deal as the UK
As Barnier has said “No deal is the worst solution for everybody. It would be a huge economic problem for the UK and also for the EU. I’m not working for that deal, I’m working for a deal.”
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@victor-meldrew said in British Politics:
@majorrage said in British Politics:
If he pays the minimum wage, and he has people queuing up for jobs is that his problem? If he doesn't have people queuing up for jobs then it certainly is.
Which neatly explains why the electorate rejected Richard's pleas to stay in the EU. He's perfectly happy to import labour from the EU so he can pay the lowest possible to his workers and depress wages for local people. And then shakes his head in disbelief when people he regards as stupid and ill-informed vote to change the system.
I get accused on here of being some kind of Marxist but even I have to dispute that view.
Richard has a business only because he can find workers willing to work at his cost structure. Those workers are not living in poverty and the same opportunities are available to locals as those they have taken up.
Those people who won't work for Richard want to blame someone else for their own attitudes being shown up by 'foreigners'.
When I first lived over here it was kiwis and aussies doing lots of the hospitality work and building labour. We were happy to get stuck in and work where the locals would turn their noses up at the chance. Now it's Eastern Europeans doing the same.
I have witnessed first hand a workplace where almost every day a 'Euro' would ask for work and those taken on were hard working. I was on the same pay as they would have been in a relative position.
The business owners were actually very pro-Brexit even though they whenever they employed a 'local' it wouldn't last out a day or two.
I call bullshit on the jobs taken by others argument. Remove the 'others' and the job will disappear as the companies will struggle to fill them.
Then you are still left with unemployable and less business to pay for their benefits. -
@victor-meldrew said in British Politics:
@catogrande said in British Politics:
Same problems but different causes. Major suffered a shrinkage in his majority at the GE and had to wrestle with piston wristed gibbons like the Hamiltons
No. it was because he joined the ERM (the Euro precurser) and signed up to the Maastricht treaty against many in his own party and very much against the public mood.
Joining the ERM, in particular, was an unmitigated political disaster which destroyed the Tories electoral chances for the next 3 elections.
There were many reasons that Major suffered the reduced majority (and it was that reduced majority that caused the commonality that you previously referred to, not any of the peripheral issues you’ve brought up) most of which he inherited. The build up to the Maastricht agreement, ERM etc were part of that.
The Tories disasterous 1997 election was a result of a slow burn against the unpopular but continued policies allied to the appalling behaviour of a number of their MPs (note Hamilton referred to above. The ERM fiasco was really only a small part of it.) That they became un-electable for the next three elections owes much to that and much to Blair re- inventing Labour.
We have a history of fairly long periods of one party domination followed by a real pushback. In post war years see Churchill, Eden, MacMillan and then the night of blood that saw Wilson into power. Oddly enough, all the big Conservative players declined to follow MacMillan and let someone else take the poisoned chalice - ring any bells? We then had a period of Labour domination albeit briefly interrupted by a slender Tory majority. Then the Thatcher landslide and you know the rest.
Current position is something of an anomaly going by history of the last 70 years. The way Labour is now ought to leave them in the wilderness for years. Cameron’s stupid decision to allow the referendum and the incompetence of his campaigning is the difference.
The man is a political idiot. He had it all and royally fucked it up.
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@crucial said in British Politics:
Richard has a business only because he can find workers willing to work at his cost structure. Those workers are not living in poverty and the same opportunities are available to locals as those they have taken up.
Those people who won't work for Richard want to blame someone else for their own attitudes being shown up by 'foreigners'I'm anything but a Marxist - Robert Owen is probably my business hero.
Worked in the UK and Europe for too many years to mention and I've never found much difference overall in work attitude between British workers and their European, Oz or Kiwi workers. If anything I've found UK workers more flexible - more so than German or French workers. Management is another story however.....
I have seen business plans by UK companies run by Richard's which have been pretty explicit about reducing labour costs by sacking UK employees and advertising in Eastern Europe for people to work at minimum wage and living in hostels instead.
The locals don't have the same opportunities - they have a choice of having their wages reduced or going on benefits while still needing to house and feed their families - while EU workers often live 2-3 to a room claiming UK benefits for their wife and kids still living in Poland, Romania etc. And the fucked-up UK benefits system actually rewards employers who do this by subsidising the lower wages.
Politicians and employers like Richard - generally too short-sighted, incompetent and frankly thick, to understand things like productivity and the importance of local communities to their business - then say they can't understand why people voted for Brexit.
No doubt Richard is now campaigning for a 2nd referendum.
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@catogrande said in British Politics:
The ERM fiasco was really only a small part of it.
It was the defining moment though. Crashing out of the ERM destroyed the Tories reputation for economic confidence and they never recovered (check out the opinion poll figures).
Bloody ironic as Major and Ken Clarke then delivered arguably the strongest UK economy in years. Some would say so strong it took the Great Moron over a decade to fuck it up
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@catogrande said in British Politics:
Cameron’s stupid decision to allow the referendum and the incompetence of his campaigning is the difference.
Think decision to hold the referendum was sensible as it should have settled the issue in favour of EU membership once and for all according to polls at the time. A Remain vote would have spiked UKIP and the growing anti-EU mood in Labour (Corbyn and the Left have always disliked the EU)
Campaign was worse than incompetent - it took people for fools, patronised them and insulted their intelligence. Getting foreign leaders like Obama involved was particularly stupid.
The EU were even stupider. Who'd want to stay in the EU when it's led by a loon who believed a Brexit vote "would mean the end of Western civilisation" FFS.
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@victor-meldrew said in British Politics:
@catogrande said in British Politics:
The ERM fiasco was really only a small part of it.
It was the defining moment though. Crashing out of the ERM destroyed the Tories reputation for economic confidence and they never recovered (check out the opinion poll figures).
Bloody ironic as Major and Ken Clarke then delivered arguably the strongest UK economy in years. Some would say so strong it took the Great Moron over a decade to fuck it up
You're right but I would argue it's not in context of the discussion re the referendum.
On a scale of fuck ups though I'd place the ERM balls up somewhere behind Gordon Brown announcing he was going to sell a load of our gold reserves sometime before he actually did. Only fair to give the speculators a little time to get prepared.
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@catogrande said in British Politics:
@victor-meldrew said in British Politics:
@catogrande said in British Politics:
The ERM fiasco was really only a small part of it.
It was the defining moment though. Crashing out of the ERM destroyed the Tories reputation for economic confidence and they never recovered (check out the opinion poll figures).
Bloody ironic as Major and Ken Clarke then delivered arguably the strongest UK economy in years. Some would say so strong it took the Great Moron over a decade to fuck it up
You're right but I would argue it's not in context of the discussion re the referendum.
On a scale of fuck ups though I'd place the ERM balls up somewhere behind Gordon Brown announcing he was going to sell a load of our gold reserves sometime before he actually did. Only fair to give the speculators a little time to get prepared.
To be fair I thought it was a stroke of genius. I took a couple of kilos myself at $280. I still have it.
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Just worth noting the referendum was won with 51.9% to 48.1%
That is bloody close so for all this "will of the people" bollocks entirely ignores that nearly half (not quite, I fully acknowledge leave won) of those who voted wanted to remain.
I think the mandate that gives is to leave but to also consider what a massive chunk of the electorate want which is to retain ties.
It has left us with a massive clusterfuck of a situation and the Tories are falling apart under the strain.
Also, it was not clear what BREXIT meant with plenty of leave campaigners claiming we could replicate other deals that are essentially EU light.
Personally I would like another vote as I don't think people were well informed the first time with clear campaign breaches from leave and greater context of what it means. I still think a significant amount of people would still want it but I suspect the result would flip.
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@davesofthunder said in British Politics:
Just worth noting the referendum was won with 51.9% to 48.1%
Personally I would like another vote as I don't think people were well informed the first time with clear campaign breaches from leave and greater context of what it means. I still think a significant amount of people would still want it but I suspect the result would flip.Yep.
Never underestimate the British appetite for Status Quo
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@mikethesnow said in British Politics:
@davesofthunder said in British Politics:
Just worth noting the referendum was won with 51.9% to 48.1%
Personally I would like another vote as I don't think people were well informed the first time with clear campaign breaches from leave and greater context of what it means. I still think a significant amount of people would still want it but I suspect the result would flip.Yep.
Never underestimate the British appetite for Status Quo
or even Status Quo lite with no John Coghlan and Alan Lancaster.
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@davesofthunder said in British Politics:
Just worth noting the referendum was won with 51.9% to 48.1%
That is bloody close so for all this "will of the people" bollocks entirely ignores that nearly half (not quite, I fully acknowledge leave won) of those who voted wanted to remain.
I think the mandate that gives is to leave but to also consider what a massive chunk of the electorate want which is to retain ties.
It has left us with a massive clusterfuck of a situation and the Tories are falling apart under the strain.
Also, it was not clear what BREXIT meant with plenty of leave campaigners claiming we could replicate other deals that are essentially EU light.
Personally I would like another vote as I don't think people were well informed the first time with clear campaign breaches from leave and greater context of what it means. I still think a significant amount of people would still want it but I suspect the result would flip.
There you highlight the problems with a referendum. It is 99% guaranteed to give a binary outcome notwithstanding that a very large chunk of the population may be against the result. Also that the public are asked to make this binary choice with little information or understanding of the ramifications, certainly in this instance.
But, now it's done, it's done.
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@victor-meldrew said in British Politics:
Which neatly explains why the electorate rejected Richard's pleas to stay in the EU. He's perfectly happy to import labour from the EU so he can pay the lowest possible to his workers and depress wages for local people. And then shakes his head in disbelief when people he regards as stupid and ill-informed vote to change the system.
Stupider than Chloe Jones IMHO
But that was his business plan. Everybody paid taxes, everybody earned at least the minimum wage. Everybody was happy.
He doesn’t depress wages for anybody. The depression comes from people being prepared to work harder than others.
And what’s happening now? Lots of eastern EUR is gone, and those who are left are demanding higher wages. So who suffers there?
The Chloe's have been left behind, marginalised, called stupid, feckless and generally treated like shit by governments of all flavours and by business for years. The political establishment ignored them - and handed them on a plate to the likes of Farage and the Leave campaign
Yep, nail on the head with that one.
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@catogrande said in British Politics:
Gordon Brown announcing he was going to sell a load of our gold reserves sometime before he actually did
I'd forgotten that fiasco - cost £5Bn. Pales into significance compared to the NHS IT program which blew £19Bn before being scrapped, having delivered nothing.
(bit off topic so I'll end it there )
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@majorrage said in British Politics:
And what’s happening now? Lots of eastern EUR is gone, and those who are left are demanding higher wages. So who suffers there?
Wages are pretty static or growing slowly and probably not a bad thing considering the wage squeeze over the last few years. The lack of cheap labour could well be forcing managers to actually manage and invest in people to increase productivity. About bloody time.
UK productivity grows strongly but it still lags behind Europe
"Productivity in the UK grew by 0.9pc and 0.7pc in the final two quarters of 2017, the strongest growth since 2011.
But, the UK’s output per hour is still around a quarter behind competitors like France and Germany, meaning it takes British workers five days to produce what others achieve in four."
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@majorrage said in British Politics:
Everybody was happy.
He doesn’t depress wages for anybody. The depression comes from people being prepared to work harder than others.The wage depression comes from people from Eastern Europe being able to work and support their families in Eastern Europe on those reduced wages. Not a level playing field.
I just don't buy into the "better work ethic" argument - seems to me a very convenient rationalisation for importing cheap labour and a lack of interest in productivity and people management
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@victor-meldrew said in British Politics:
@majorrage said in British Politics:
And what’s happening now? Lots of eastern EUR is gone, and those who are left are demanding higher wages. So who suffers there?
Wages are pretty static or growing slowly and probably not a bad thing considering the wage squeeze over the last few years. The lack of cheap labour could well be forcing managers to actually manage and invest in people to increase productivity. About bloody time.
UK productivity grows strongly but it still lags behind Europe
"Productivity in the UK grew by 0.9pc and 0.7pc in the final two quarters of 2017, the strongest growth since 2011.
But, the UK’s output per hour is still around a quarter behind competitors like France and Germany, meaning it takes British workers five days to produce what others achieve in four."
Sorry Victor, but at the risk of derailing the conversation, you do know that if you wanted to increase productivity investing in people is the thing you wouldn’t do, don’t you? Given it is the ratio of value-added output to inputs, the lower your cost of inputs (usually through less or cheaper people) the better.
The single biggest reason Germany’s productivity over time is so far ahead of the UK’s is that Germany has a concentration of industries that lend themselves better to automation and robotics than the UK has.
If your premise is that the cheap EU workers are responsible for the UK’s lower productivity, think how much worse it would be had they not been there to lower the input side of the equation!
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@victor-meldrew said in British Politics:
But, the UK’s output per hour is still around a quarter behind competitors like France and Germany, meaning it takes British workers five days to produce what others achieve in four."
Some of that will also be a reflection of industry mix compared to Germany and France. A couple of years ago France had the highest output per hour worked in the OECD, for better or worse through high technology usage, a 35 hour working week, and 10% unemployment. New Zealand's labour productivity stats are among the worst in the OECD but we've almost gone the opposite way to France with close to 'full' employment (not to mention a very different industry mix). Germany seems to have the best of all worlds on those metrics - high productivity and slightly lower unemployment than the UK.
(EDIT: though from a quick Google it looks like Germany's labour force participation rate is about 10% lower than the rate in France... the rate for the French is closer to ours at over 70%.)
Given the way the productivity stats are measured - someone once told me a nation could quickly top the labour productivity stats by firing everyone earning less than, say, $30 an hour, but there may be some ethical issues there...
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@catogrande said in British Politics:
Personally I would like another vote as I don't think people were well informed the first time with clear campaign breaches from leave and greater context of what it means.
One of the funniest things about Brexit is the Pro-EU groups like the Lib Dems, Blair, many Labour MP's and the political elite saying the referendum was advisory only, Parliament should ignore it and make decisions on EU matters, people who voted Leave - particularly working-class people - "didn't understand" (people who voted Remain were, of course, well-informed) and there was interference from foreign, outside interests
The self-same people are now campaigning for another referendum or "People's Vote" - financed by a Hungarian billionaire......
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@jc said in British Politics:
Sorry Victor, but at the risk of derailing the conversation, you do know that if you wanted to increase productivity investing in people is the thing you wouldn’t do, don’t you? Given it is the ratio of value-added output to inputs, the lower your cost of inputs (usually through less or cheaper people) the better.
Nope.
Replace a well-paid, trained, skilled motivated worker with a cheaper, less skilled option and the re-work from errors and carelessness input to the system will not only reduce the overall output by reducing value-add, it will divert management resources and, worst of all, damage your customer base/reputation.
Which is why so many companies who outsourced to India brought it back onshore - it was costing them a fortune.
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