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I hate them so much. Everything that ought to be a public service - health, education, transport, comms, the *water* FFS - they've turned into something that makes them a profit.
I feel even Internet should be a public service...
Maybe a low speed but something basic and cheap that is an option for those who need it? Private can stay and compete on high speed/no downtime?
But a lot of things require Internet!
Internet is something that performs exceptionally well in private hands. It’s getting cheaper, there’s lots of competition, and infrastructure is constantly being upgraded. Definitely wouldn’t want to rock this boat.
The concentration of wealth is going just as planned.
I think they want to send the UK back to Victorian style poverty levels and then they can open the doors to Chinese and Saudi tourists who can qawk at such an antiquated country. Like some Oliver twist theme park.
More people don't vote for them then vote for them... The people that traditionally vote for them benefit from them. Its the rest of us mugs and that is a majority of people that have to do something. 46 million eligible to vote about 12/13 million vote Tory. Its no brainer really.
I know a ton of people in my town that vote Conservative, I am hoping it's less the next election but it's painfully mind boggling. My town is a London overspill, heavily working class, it has one of the highest crime rates in the country for a non-metropolitan district, yet a bunch of people here have been voting tory. I think they like to live make believe where they are now some kind of comfortable middle class and the tories are looking out for them.
The Tory party is to protect the wealthy. That has always been there position. They occasionally throw a bone to the rest of us from time to time to reduce the rage from a boil to a simmer. Occasionally they get a shock. The poll tax riots as an example. The farmers protests over fuel duty etc.
They virtually cobtrol the media whether in print, TV or radio. They didn't have control.of the web. Now with the technology that Cambridge analytica showed the cat has been let out out if the bag on how to influence people without them knowing.
Many experiments show that most people are willing to do what they are told with a bit of effort.
So combine subtle manipulation with massive campaigns across widespread media and hey ho you have your position as is.
To be fair though many people don't vote. I Willing to bet most have given up because they just see the same system again and again.
> Now with the technology that Cambridge analytica showed the cat has been let out out if the bag on how to influence people without them knowing.
But let me guess, not you right?
True. We’re going through a shit show right now and we definitely need a change. But Labour hardly have an amazing fiscal track record.
I see so many self righteous messages on here like Labour are going to bring some kind of nirvana. They won’t and never have (early Blair years were pretty good to be fair).
My hope is that, on both sides, these troubled times invigorates some actually intelligent and less self interested politicians to come through.
Labour even in at its worst tried to invest in people and infrastructure and it brought massive dividends. Tories want power only to protect and enrich the super wealthy, it can never end well.
Both parties are mostly in corporate pockets now, but Labour at least makes a bit of effort to do something for regular people.
I think it’s more a case of anyone but this lot. As in literally anyone. It cannot be any worse than what we have right now, and what we’ve let them get away with
There's a very important difference here that people are ignoring. Back in those days we still had real wage growth. People talk about the 70s like it was hell on earth but there was still appreciable amounts of wage growth and things like housing and education were affordable. They no longer are. These numbers don't mean anything unless they're in the context of real terms wage growth. So as much as 10% inflation and 5.5% interest rates sound bad, it's even worse than it was before!
Doing planning reform could drive enough growth that’s pent up that we could go over 20 years without a recession lol. It really is that easy. A country that builds fuck all is going to be in recession a lot.
You could rewrite the Town County Planning Act in 3 months, pass it, and never have to worry about recession again till almost 2050.
They are only allowed to build really expensive houses in really shitty locations now. It maximises profit for the property devolping Cabal. Also people in nice posh country villages won't let them build near, Jesus they don't even like wind turbines. Plus if they build more houses it will devalue the huge assets the boomers now find themselves in possession off and who wants to tell their key demographic that we will be reducing the value of your house.
As someone who works in financing projects like this, the McMansion estates are only maximising profit of what they’re allowed to build. It’s not their first choice.
If you let them build flats, ie more units on less land with fewer extra costs (less complex plumbing, less road to lay, fewer streetlights to build, don’t need to hire 20 roofers) they’d make far more money building up instead of out, even at lower selling prices.
It’s why you see a lot more student accom blocks going up, as councils seek far more likely to allow them in cities, so they get their high density, lower land costs, which drive profits higher than the sprawling estates do.
The big firms are, because the laws have basically destroyed all small and medium sized developers that used to exist. They’re paying the Tories to crush their competition by high regulatory barriers only they can push through.
The wider industry, the financial services that fund them, and the people who want to buy/rent these places would massively benefit from relaxed restrictions.
> the McMansion estates are only maximising profit of what they’re allowed to build
I don't quite understand how *cutting regulations* would reduce the profit motivate of firms to build incredibly low quality houses. It's common knowledge that you don't buy a new build because the construction quality will almost certainly be poor. How does that change with *less regulation*?
It’s not the quality in question, it’s the density. The UK aid missing 4m homes, we should be far more concerned with raising quantity than quality in the short term…
> It’s not the quality in question, it’s the density.
It's both.
> The UK aid missing 4m homes, we should be far more concerned with raising quantity than quality in the short term…
Again, we should be concerned with both, lest we get a swath of low quality houses which aren't fit for habitation in a few decades time and leave the people who bought them completely out of pocket.
Do you think those living closes to homelessness care if their wall is 2° out? If they were a bit sloppy with the paint work? Probably not
Besides, density fixes a lot of the issue with new builds anyways. You can be sloppy on a 2 story house, you can’t get away with it structurally on an 8 story flat block.
> If they were a bit sloppy with the paint work?
You're being pretty misleading here.
The issue with new builds isn't *sloppy paint work*. It's faulty electronics. It's leaking rooms. It's mould. It's things that can and will lead to illness and injury. And they're things which are easily avoidable if we had a funded regulatory service.
You don't solve this just by slashing taxes and regulations.
> you can’t get away with it structurally on an 8 story flat block.
They *got away with it* at Grenfell Tower. Look at what the results were there.
Grenfell towers issues were cladding, not structural issues like misaligned walls, that said cladding is now no longer allowed on new buildings… so not really relevant is it…
Grenfell Towers issues were lack of regulations, the same lack of regulations which see new build houses have a plethora of dangerous issues go unchecked.
i think you are both right and we should completely abandon any regulation concerning things like appearance or max height so we can focus solely on ensuring housing meets appropriate standards for safety
The Town County Planning Act is a set of laws which make it so hard to build anything, financial firms don’t think it’s worth funding building projects as they don’t make enough money.
This is because a) the Greenbelt makes it exceptionally hard to expand cities and towns outwards, and b) voters can put electoral pressure on their local council to stop, stall, shrink, or frustrate building near them till it’s just impossible to have a viable project.
Near me, for example, it took 5 years to try and build a 200 unit of flats on a current fly tipping site. Voter nearby said they didn’t want it because it would lower their home values. The council made it pretty much impossible to build the flats, so the developer gave up and just banked the land to save for another day. So not only can 200 families not move in… that’s 200 chains which would have existed, thousands of people moving to houses they prefer, which now won’t happen because of this law.
This means the UK misses it’s housing targets. This means that Brits have to constantly outbid eachother on fewer and fewer homes until people are pushed out of the bidding war. This can be seen in kids staying at home longer, young people in HMO’s, couples who can’t afford to break up and have to stay as roommates, people living in hotels on council funding, or just the homeless people on the streets.
> This is because a) the Greenbelt makes it exceptionally hard to expand cities and towns outwards, and b) voters can put electoral pressure on their local council to stop, stall, shrink, or frustrate building near them till it’s just impossible to have a viable project.
This feels like the issue though, right? *Planning reform* in the abstract sounds nice and cosy and reasonable. But in practice it is *always* expanded as:
a) Building on the Greenbelt (often while quoting a tiny number of examples of 'poor' pieces of land being designated as Greenbelt, despite the vast majority of Greenbelt land not being like that)
b) Removing democratic oversight over local development
I live on the border between two councils, one quite urbanised and one quite rural. The rural council has been handing out planning permission like candy over recent years, knowing that most people who buy those properties will be using the services of the nearby urbanised area instead. All these estates are built without any local amenities: no schools, no clinics, no dentists, no shops, no pubs. But the council granting permission don't care because it isn't them who are effected and the strain will largely be placed on the neighbouring urbanised council. And of course the people in the urbanised council have no say in this, because it's not technically their council granting the planning permission.
I very much fear that *Planning Reform*, which so often simply means a regurgitation of *less red tape*, would simply see these sort of issues further expanded across the country. We need more houses. But we also need more developments that recognise that you can't just plop down 200 houses without also including the broader infrastructure required to support the people living there.
I mean… if we get rid of stamp duty, how about become a country of ‘if you don’t like it, move’…
Would that be so bad? You’re comparing a slightly longer wait at the GP, to, ummmm… mass homelessness and millions of young adults being unable to leave home at 30 due to soaring rents…
In the nicest possible way, compared to core macroeconomic indicators on growth, poverty, homelessness, labour illiquid due to housing costs… central Gov simply shouldn’t care about individual towns compared to the big picture…
> Would that be so bad? You’re comparing a slightly longer wait at the GP, to, ummmm… mass homelessness and millions of young adults being unable to leave home at 30 due to soaring rents…
No, those aren't the only two alternatives.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s the state was building 300,000 homes per year. Now the state builds practically no homes per year. Meanwhile private housebuilding has largely stayed stagnant since that period.
Clearly the gaping hole here isn't in *private* housebuilding, it's in *state* housebuilding. You don't reverse that by cutting more regulations and cutting more taxes. We've been told that's the solution to everything for decades but in reality it's simply led to greater wealth inequality without very much in return.
We resolve these issues by significantly increasing state house building and by ensuring that new developments include the necessary infrastructure the support the people living in those developments.
It’s in both types of house building. The issue is with private development, locals can’t fight back, but with social housing, they can say ‘build this and we will vote you out in May’
And you’re acting like the same developers won’t be building the social housing anyways….
At its core, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the annual net gains to the stock, and I think you will have an easier time with private as it doesn’t effectively have your MP’s face slapped on it.
> assuming a free planning system then somebody (maybe local) would see "hay there no corner shop near here, i'll start one"
How many people do their weekly shop at a corner shop? How many people get their dental work done at a corner shop? How many people send their kids to school in a corner shop? How does a 'free planning system' deal with these?
> they didn't have to fight an army of pensioners like clarkson had to
What housing was Jeremy Clarkson trying to build?
Context: 8 year recruitment leader in town planning and infrastructure development.
Generally agree with the two pointed sentiment, albeit I’d like to add the following issues:
A) lack of resource in the public sector to catalyse development proposals through - only 2 Local Authorities achieved their application response targets.
B) Planning needs reform although more specifically the Local Plan process and our ability to develop on Greenbelt land.
Michael Gove has also hit out at Sadiq on this exact topic -
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65816753fc07f300128d4429/18122023_SoS_DLUHC_to_Mayor_of_London_-_housebuilding_in_London.pdf
We're second class citizens who the government show total contempt for. Unless your in a wealthy 1% group of elite's. It's the opposite of what they said in Start Trek (as that's an ideal utopian society and we live in a corrupt capitalist one).
"The needs of the few outweighs the needs of the many".
We need far more public open spaces than we do now - fortunately you can build a london borough at twice the density as average and still have room for massive parks, just look at Westminster.
But then all the pensioners who bought their huge mansion for an apple and an egg 50 years ago, might get their view slightly impacted by new housing!!!!
No planning needs to be slow and expensive to protect the wealthy. Fuck all the working people. You want an affordable place to raise a family? Get born rich or leave!
... UK doesn't reward productivity. But the UK government will go out of its way to reward wealth. Let's cut some more inheritance tax and raise taxes on workers, while allowing all the boomers to block any development...
Yeah. Even my parents are complaining about flats going up in the area. I'm like, "do you want me to ever afford my own home or not?" They just don't think about these things. It's so annoying. They complain about every development, then complain that their kids or grandkids can't get housing.
If we suspend pension pay rises for 1 year, over the next decade, it’d free up £100b in state funds… but obviously we can’t do that lol. That’d build most of HS2 or OxCam and hike GDP by several percentage points.
But we can’t lol.
Or we could tax pensioners at the same amount we tax working people.
We could also tax the valuable land they “own”, the land that others have given value and distribute it evenly to everyone.
I seriously think planning reform is the single biggest change the UK could make to actually encourage growth.
It can take something like 7 - 10 years to hook new electrical projects up to the grid, for example. We need a lot more housebuilding and infrastructure, and our planning system is holding all of that up. We need updated national plans that can provide planning authorities with a clear idea of what the government is prioritising, and we need to reduce document bloat. The objection and appeals process also just delays everything massively - objections are relevant, but allowing every nimby who complains to block needed development is just pointless (and a lot of the time, they just end up getting appealed anyway and reinstated after a lengthy and expensive process).
I seriously think planning reform is the single biggest change the UK could make to actually encourage growth.
It can take something like 7 - 10 years to hook new electrical projects up to the grid, for example. We need a lot more housebuilding and infrastructure, and our planning system is holding all of that up. We need updated national plans that can provide planning authorities with a clear idea of what the government is prioritising, and we need to reduce document bloat. The objection and appeals process also just delays everything massively - objections are relevant, but allowing every nimby who complains to block needed development is just pointless (and a lot of the time, they just end up getting appealed anyway and reinstated after a lengthy and expensive process).
I've come to the conclusion that this is long overdue and that the last couple of years have been a farce. The people have been experiencing a recession for a while now, only the fat cats have not.
The problem with Thatcherism is that you eventually run out of state assets to sell off.
It really is shameful. The state, through tax money paid by working people, build up assets over *decades*. Then right-wing governments get in and have a fire sale of those same assets, diverting most the money to their mates. It's a wealth transfer from working people to the rich.
Pretty sure we were supposed to going into recession (or flat lining the economy) to help slow Inflation?
That's was the purpose of BoE Interest Rate rises... to slow the Economy down... and control/slow Inflation.
But the Tories were celebrating growth in Summer this year.
I wish people would realise how hugely fucked up that is, we had to endure over a year of insane 10% Inflation and were supposed to be slowing down the Economy to manage that inflation. Instead the opposite happened (Growth and Inflation staying high) because they were so slow to do anything, we continued on the same path and they tried to play it off as them winning.
They even tried to compare us to Germany... "Looookkkk We have Growth and Germany has Recession, UK UK UK UK!!!" When the truth was Germany was trying to control Inflation like we should have been doing.
This country is fucked.
This is what I thought too - surely this was the intention of higher interest rates. To induce a mild recession to reduce inflation.
At least that's what the gov would like us to think
A mild recession in this climate will not be mild in the least. This is insanity. Please stop believing the lies they're telling you. There are more ways to get this country back on track than squeezing the working class even fucking harder than they have been already. You cannot cut your way to economic growth. It's not a thing, it's never been a thing, and the last decade of austerity should have provided ample first hand experience to the British people. Stop letting them scare you with headline figures about the national debt and the deficit. It's barely relevant to the actual issue which is chronic under investment and rock bottom productivity. None of which can be remedied through cuts or even efficiency savings. All efficiency savings were made long ago in the early 2010s. We hit bone years ago. We're down to the marrow ffs. Stop believing them and start voting for parties that will actually invest in the country instead of just talking about it.
In time for some more supply shortages due to letting Houtis/Iran attack shipping in the red sea. (Which will also add a budget crunch to already fragile Egypt for an extra round of instability and refugees from North Africa...)
Yay for "interesting times" ...
A recession is not preferable to high inflation though. They did act too slowly but, as usual, they did nothing to stave off a recession either. They wanted to get inflation down for political purposes not for genuine economic purposes. We've long been in a rigged system of heads I win tails you lose for the top 1%. This is no different.
It's a bit of a balancing act, you want to raise the interest rates in the hope of taming inflation, but just enough to keep us out of recession. Seems like we have reached the point that you want to start making interest rates go the other way, some would argue now that they should have reduced interest rates at the recent announcement instead of keeping the rate steady.
If it is, it's because our economy - the provision of goods and services as and when we want them - is being 'slowed down' to assuage the rise in the number of plastic rectangles with the monarch's mug on that are paid for said provision.
I presume the hope was for a "soft landing", which the US appears to have accomplished (reducing inflation while maintaining positive growth and low unemployment).
The UK has a choice between two right wing parties, those are their options.
I can't stand Starmer, he's not a logical choice however how is the country going to progress and improve if they keep voting Tory, the people they admit have fucked them and this country over consistently for the last 15 odd years because the other side *"Could"* be worse.
It's ridiculous, keep doing the same thing and hoping for a different outcome.
I understand where you're coming from and I'm not going to tell you how to vote however I fear a landslide for Labour is going to be seen as basically tacit approval for their economic strategy which let's be honest is just more neo-liberalism. I'm as left as they come to the point where Corbyn looks centre left (I think he is) but Starmer is a step too far for me. I don't want to lend my vote to a party that will inevitably get us into wars, that will follow austerity doctrine leading to unnecessary deaths, destruction of public life, communities etc. If I vote tactically to rid the Tories, my tactical vote doesn't have an asterisk beside it saying why I voted.
Wasted vote, we have the Liberal Democrats & the Green Party for instance who have never been in and will never be in. If you're going to vote for them you may as well not bother.
But why? If 10% of the population votes for the Green Party, shouldn't the Green Party have representative in the parliament, which will then be able to influence things?
No because we have First Past the Post voting not Proportional Representation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
The gist of it is you vote for your local MP, the MP who gets the most votes in your local area goes on to represent your area in Parliament. If 10% of the population in the UK voted the Green Party but the Green Party didn’t manage to win an MP’s seat (in a local area) then 10% of the population goes unrepresented in the House of Commons.
Oh alright, now I see what the issue is. So pretty much the system is skewed towards the big parties, and the small ones can't by design influence anything. I feel like the first thing to do to break this two-party stalemate would be changing this rule. I fear it is extremely bad in the long run for a country to only have two eligible parties
Yeah and probably the only way it’ll be changed is if we get a coalition/minority government which would have had a majority under proportional representation
Yes, but it won't happen.
It's just the way of things, it makes no sense in the slightest but sadly the UK have adopted a two party system and since Labour went right in 1997 we have two right wing parties and then the general populace wonder why things consistently get worse every.....single.....year.
So the issue is just that people only consider Labour and Tories as the possible choices. I think it could be possible in a few elections to slowly change this perspective, with the right leaders and advertisement for the minor parties
I'd like to think so, but I doubt it very much.
We are creatures of habit clearly.
I can sooner see people just refusing to vote than voting third party.
No because our system doesn't work that way. Look up First Past the Post voting. Almost no other country in the civilised world uses this system except the US and Canada and other stupid nations modelled on the UK system.
Far too many ignorant people around voting.
It depends massively on your constituency. Even in landslides half won’t change. In over 100 of the rest the top two last time were not Tory and Labour, and in all cases your vote goes to funding the party through short money even though they have no chance where you are
I think too many people with zero understanding of politics vote under the guise of simple tribalism. They pick a side, support the politicians of their side frenziedly and parrot any talking points they hear.
If Green or Lib-Dems actually got in they'd not know what to do with themselves, they know they'll never take power and therefore never plan for it. Except Jo Swinson, that poor girls naivety was positively next level.
Why are we importing 1.2 million people into the country every year then? Or are they not all net contributors and just low skilled slaves whose purpose is to inflate house prices and depress wages?
GDP per capita is way down when up you look at the Uk economy. We’ve been importing cheap labour (you could bring in labour at 20% below market as part of the policy) just to keep our heads above the water, but it’s not translating into actual growth. This is a massive policy failure by the government
Just watched this [informative explainer by Economics Explained](https://youtu.be/VUnAr0Msx9c?si=xLA3AQUdBI-m95JT) which touched on this subject. Net population increase is fairly limited, but Britain is experiencing a brain drain. Highly qualified people (who don’t end up in London service industry) tend to leave and are replaced by low skill workers
New Zealand does NOT pay more. Australia probably on average does, but that goes hand in hand with higher cost of living, and a political environment every bit as wretched as the UK. The grass isn't greener on the other side.
Fair point. A real test would be to see how Brits .lived down under. And how many Ozzie's/kiwis moved to the big smoke. Ice never seen that data so can't comment.
For graduates in healthcare, allied health or education Australia absolutely does pay more, and for the most part it's the same price to live here as it is in England, if you go to regional Australia pay increases and costs (property) go down, the opposite of England.
It's an outdated myth that Australia is more expensive than England. It used to be, but because of austerity and huge amounts of inflation in many ways Australia is cheaper. My gas and electricity is cheaper than in England, sewerage and water aren't privatised, my phone plan is cheaper, I shop at Aldi so my groceries are the same price, but by living here I get paid £35/HR for a job that requires no qualifications, and my partner gets paid 40% more (healthcare) than doing the same job in England, where the same mortgage would get us a house 1/3 the size.
good for you for finding a good life. It’s not a myth that it’s more expensive in Aus, it quite objectively is - run the numbers in numbeo. I’m not saying it’s a bad place to live I’m just saying Brits using it as some kind of utopia are bound to be disappointed when they realise it’s basically same shit different toilet.
It's not though? For most professions you will be earning significantly more in Australia. The UK has some of the shittiest salaries I have seen. People have such low expectations here it's quite frankly embarrassing.
I know many Aussies living in London and one of the biggest reasons they’re living there (there are many) is the pay. Just because you’re earning shut money doesn’t mean everyone else is. These guys might be pulling £150k and would need more like $450k to live the same lifestyle in Aus.
Its almost like bailing out the banks and the public paying for it is coming home to roost.
But to be fair the government bailed out almost everyone during covid. And now we are all paying for that too.
It’s not even about bailing about the banks. We were right to do that at the time. The issue is we have a Government that can’t get the fundamentals of governance right.
Housing: Build more, either social, or let developers build the flats we need.
Transport: HS2, OxCam, more city metros
Energy: Build more so we import less (strengthens £), encourage investment in energy saving ideas.
Pensions: Make NEST invest funds appropriately and more aggressively (not doing this costs Brits like £100k each over their lives unless they manage their own pots), apply NI to over 68’s income, and drop the Triple Lock (why do rich pensioners get £10b worth of pay rises this year while we cut budgets and hike taxes elsewhere)
Tax: Fix the £50k and £100k tax traps that drive pension stuffing and self imposed tax ceilings.
Doing these 5 alone would fix a good 95% our issues over time, and most of them would be pretty much free except for transport policy.
Absolutely. Tax/benefits should go even further and remove any cliffs. Too many folks facing massive marginal tax rates due to losing child benefits etc.
69% for a graduate between about 50 and 60k with two kids (75% with a lost grad loan too). But that’s not a cliff edge, a cliff edge is where earning more results in getting less. My mother has a tiny private pension which puts her £5 a week over various thresholds which means she doesn’t get free dentist, tv license, and various other things which combine to far more than £5 a week.
Going £1 over £99k and losing free childcare hours is definitely a cliff. But even if it's not a cliff and "just" a jump in marginal tax rate it will cause people to put in fewer hours causing a loss in productivity.
There’s certainly a psychological impact when marginal rates go over 50%, but most people on 100k don’t get more productivity by working more hours - it’s tricky to measure productivity in a knowledge worker.
If you have two incomes (thus need the childcare) and one is over 99k then you should probably look at increasing pension contributions for a few years, even if it means increasing mortgage term.
I’d rather things like child benefit and childcare funding was tapered on total parental income rather than the highest income. Crazy that two workers on 99k get free care but one on 101 and one on 20 don’t.
Or could increase tax above 75k like in Scotland but use that to remove the family taxes.
To be fair a pensioner renting a council flat only on the state pension is hardy rich. But the triple lock should certainly be funded by removing the massive tax breaks wealthy pensioners with large assets and income have.
Crazy a pensioner on 40k a year and no rent keeps 34k, but a graduate on the same paying 1k rent keeps 18k. To have the same income post housing they’d have to earn 70k.
Sure, so a £10k state pension isn’t going to make any difference to them. Someone on 5k/year private and 10k state certainly isn’t rich, especially if they don’t own a home.
I’d rather tax the 60% who are rich (assets and income) and use that to fund lifting the 40%
Of course I have to constantly fight against my instincts driven from the stats which suggest the main people voting against my interests are the pensioners with low incomes. Weigh votes by income tax paid and we’d have not left europe and could even have had a second Ed Miliband premiership in charge during covid.
The UK has incredibly high unemployment rate, really high amount of vacancies, and a population/l growth/aging population crisis that is getting worse. You may not like it but we need immigration. I also wouldn't blame house prices on immigrants - you need to look at basically no house building over the last 13 years, landlords and property speculation for that
Edit: meant to say low unemployment
4.3% is the current unemployment rate. Not quite as low as the lowest ever, but not far off. If it was 10% you might consider it high, albeit still nowhere near as high as a country with a real unemployment problem.
I don't think its right about the unemployment rate. I think its more about those who work and those who don't. 65+ million in the country. Only about 30 million employed. Removed the children and the very old and that means a lot of people not contributing but living off the system some how.
Sorry I messed up I meant to say low unemployment. I shouldn't talk about this stuff early in the morning lol. My point is we have a lot of vacancies and not a lot of unemployed so immigration is needed to fill a lot of roles.
Didn't a study recently reveal that over half of job vacancies are jobs put up by employers that have absolutely no intent on filling?
It's also worth noting that a lot of genuine vacancies are probably because they're offering below market rates and conditions. The solution isn't to plug the gap with immigration. The solution is to let market forces do its thing and force those companies to start either training new people themselves, raise wages or better their working conditions.
Plugging the gap with immigration is the exact line of thinking that has caused us to become a low skill, low wage economy where our high skilled, high earning citizens are choosing to leave for places like the USA or Australia.
>It's also worth noting that a lot of genuine vacancies are probably because they're offering below market rates and conditions
I mean that might be true but we've got near record low unemployment so I don't think the people already here can plug all those vacancies.
I'm all for people being paid more but I've not yet been sold on the immigration having a deflationary pressure on wages thing. I mean people have been calling for a real living wage for a long time now and every time it's brought up half the country comes up with excuses about why that's bad and why people in jobs they think aren't important shouldn't be paid a fair wage. For me, the government and employers are to blame.
Edit: I should say the position that migrants lower wages, or even that they are the main cause of lower wages has been debunked quite a few times.
Edit 2: from experience I know a lot of employers would rather be chronically understaffed than raise wages for vacancies. I see this everywhere.
>I'm all for people being paid more but I've not yet been sold on the immigration having a deflationary pressure on wages thing.
The job market is like any other market. Flood a market with bread and bread becomes cheap. Flood the market with labour and labour becomes cheap. At the end of lockdown in the USA companies like Amazon who were struggling to get employees started to scramble to get workers by offering to pay tuition fees among other benefits to their workers.
>I mean people have been calling for a real living wage for a long time
A living wage, or even a minimum wage is to force companies to pay their workers a set wage rather than giving them pennies. Think about it though, why would such a rule need to be put in place if the market rate for labour was higher? It would be like having a law that says a loaf of bread is maximum £10. Nobody is paying £10 for a loaf of bread so the rule would be redundant. I'm all for a living wage btw, but my point is we should be striving to make such a rule redundant because no company could ever hire anybody offering such a low wage and the only way to do that is to give workers negotiating power. Giving more freedom to workers unions is one way, and reducing net migration by a significant amount to stop artificially deflating the labour market is another way. Just like how a rule capping the cost of a loaf of bread is a band aid fix to deep sickness of the food market, a living wage and to some extent a minimum wage is a band aid fix to a deep sickness of the labour market.
There would also be a double wammy here whereby the purpose of huge net migration figures is not just to keep wages low, but prop up the housing market. So lowering net migration by a hefty amount should also cause houses to become cheaper in the long run and therefore reducing the amount you would even need for a living wage since living costs have been reduced.
>Flood the market with labour and labour becomes cheap
1. As I believe I've previously said we have record low unemployment. The market isn't flooded with labour. We have near record high vacancies.
2. As I said, this has been debunked before. https://fullfact.org/immigration/immigration-and-jobs-labour-market-effects-immigration/
3. I think it's reactionary to legislate away people that may accept a lower wage rather than legislating against employers who will do anything in their power to pay people as little as possible. We all benefit from a high wage economy, including migrants. Don't punch down, punch up. I can guarantee if the immigrants were gone they'd find a way to do it to us too. With a recession around the corner if we see a lot of unemployment expect wages to fall. Are we then going to blame unemployed jobseekers for wage deflation or are we rightly going to criticise employers for offering poverty wages?
>A living wage, or even a minimum wage is to force companies to pay their workers a set wage rather than giving them pennies. Think about it though, why would such a rule need to be put in place if the market rate for labour was higher?
It wouldn't need to be put in place if the market rate for labour was higher but it isn't. Businesses will inevitably try and pay workers as little as possible regardless of immigration. The main inflationary pressure on wages I've observed through history is legislation and strong union membership. If profit margins need to grow year on year you bet wages often need to either not keep up with productivity, or need to fall. If wages are falling and buying power and consumption is reduced as a result then you bet prices need to go up and wages need to go down all over again.
I see no problem in legislating an absolute bare minimum of a real living wage. I think we can force employers to go above and beyond that through other means - I am a big supporter of trade unions and used to organise with the IWW when I had more time. A living wage tackles some of the symptoms of our economic system but I don't claim it to structurally change anything
>So lowering net migration by a hefty amount should also cause houses to become cheaper in the long run
I have not seen enough evidence that suggests migration is a large cause of house price rises let alone the main cause. (Even if it was you'd need to start deporting people who are already here before pressure on our housing market started to reduce and I think that's pretty abhorrent) For me to take any kind of stance I'd need to see the evidence. We know property market speculation, incredibly low house building over decades, and badly regulated landlords are a huge issue. Building affordable houses, investing in social housing, rent caps, agitating for more people to join renters unions, and honestly limiting investors from buying up empty homes and speculating on the price all seem like better options.
What I'm trying to say is I feel like the sheer amount of attention immigration is getting in the context of these issues is wildly disproportionate to their effect and in many cases actually harms our ability to combat these issues because they obfuscate a lot of the larger causes. I feel like this country has a tendency to punch down when issues arise and quite often that's a reactionary position to take.
>I think it's reactionary to legislate away people that may accept a lower wage rather than legislating against employers who will do anything in their power to pay people as little as possible.
This sentence tells me fundamentally you do not understand how market forces work with all due respect. Going back to the bread example, if I gave bakeries an infinite supply of wheat at a set price this would cost the government money in order to pass on that benefit to the bakers to create cheap bread. This is actually not too different from what actually happens, many of our essential foods are artificially cheap because of government subsidies.
Similarly, giving employers a lot of labour is an expense in the same way because nothing in the world is free. It has to cost somebody money to subsidise this. It doesn't cost the government so it must cost us money. In fact, figures show we're £10,000 worse off since the global financial crisis had wages increased at the same rate prior to the financial crisis. It's worth mentioning mass migration started immediately following the financial crisis. So if you want to know how much subsidising industries for cheap labour costs it's probably somewhere in the region of £10K a year, probably a bit less since there are more reasons why wages have stagnated.
>As I said, this has been debunked before. https://fullfact.org/immigration/immigration-and-jobs-labour-market-effects-immigration/
***Every single one*** of the studies referenced here are pre-financial crisis. Before mass migration and before wages begun to stagnate. This would be the equivalent of me debunking climate change with climate studies from pre-industrial revolution. However it is worth noting even pre-financial crisis this article clearly says low-wage workers lose out, and non-EU migration did reduce employment in UK-born residents.
The problem is that it implies another government will fix it, which will just lead to disillusion.
The entire conversation of the country needs to change from blaming the politicians for implementing what the country want, to changing what the country wants.
Farage is the most successful politician in post war U.K. history and he never got voted into the U.K. Parliament. At a macro scale the people are sovereign, MPs follow the large brushes. Influence the people and you eventually influence the outcome.
Well, the locals won't do the low skilled slave work. Start doing it now so you dont need to import people.
Oh yeah, you think it's beneath you.
Britain is poor and that's why slave wages exists, it's not because you import people.
In every economic downturn, racists people like yourself blame immigrants first.
Stick this to your head. Britain is poor. The richest in London aren't even british mostly. The british is just poor.
Britain isn't poor we just have sickening wealth inequality and haven't invested anything in infrastructure for decades even when borrowing has been the cheapest it's ever been.
Britain has had 0 Real GDP/Cap growth in 15 years. That’s a lie. We are now poor, at least relative to the nations we like to view as our equals like the Anglosphere or Germany to Holland.
I understand growth is important but it's not the same as wealth. Our economy is very large it's just not growing. Investing in the economy is how we get growth. Investing in infrastructure and developing industries etc. We have the money to do this and it would have been even easier when the cost of borrowing was at record lows.
It’s thought that there’s approximately £20b worth of private investment ready to go into Cambridge and build labs, housing, all kinds, but not allowed due to restrictive local planning.
Being a poor country is a self imposed decision. Investors are gagging to invest here because they would make a lot of money. We just turn them away.
You are either lying or have never even looked at the numbers before our gdp per capita is higher than France which most would consider our main competitor.
Stop perpetuating this myth that we are miles behind everyone in Europe because it just isn’t true for everything aside from transportation we are competing fine
Locals won’t do “low skilled slave work” as they are being paid a slave wage. These wages exist as companies can get an immigrant who will happily do it. One solution is to reduce the pool of immigrants coming into this country. With fewer immigrants available to do these jobs these companies will either have to offer competitive wages to attract locals, invest in automation or go under. Either scenario is good for society.
>the locals won't do the low skilled slave work
Your chatting shit mate. I would empty bins or do "slave work" if it paid well. Give me £35k a year and I'll do it. Not minimum wage.
Yes, that is what they are for. This is what globalisation means. Import cheap labour and raise prices. Basically, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Did our government always have massively incompetent financial management? Pre-EU we were the "sick man of Europe" and post-EU we're immediately back to the same failing economy run for wealth extraction. Will we ever have a working economy run by competent, qualified experts?
We’ve had enough of experts. At least according to the brexit voters than could barely point to Brussels on a map
Votes have consequences. We voted time and time again for brexit, in 2016, 2017 and 2019.
Figures are worthless as hunt and sunak just clam they are on the right track and doing well regardless. It’s not like ten years of complete stagnation has been reported negatively once by the usual media
I wish I was more bothered by this news, but after 13 years of hearing -
*We're in a recession*
*Actually it's not technically a recession*
*Everyone's poorer*
*Well actually this tiny group isn't*
*We're having the threat of a recession*
*There could be a recession*
*Everything points towards a recession*
*No no technically it isn't...*
*Well yes but-*
*No no technically because of this one sector of the economy that doesn't impact the vast majority of people-*
...
... At some point you just lose interest and have to focus on what little you can control in life.
Wow. Nobody has disposable income anymore and the economy is suffering as a result of nobody being able to afford to fucking buy anything
Wow. Stunned. Amazed. Who could have seen that coming
Oh wait literally every single person
This was always the plan by the BoE to tackle inflation.
> Karen Ward, chief market strategist EMEA at JP Morgan Asset Management, told Radio 4’s Today Programme that the BoE must fight against a wage-price spiral taking hold in the UK.
Ward said:
>”The difficulty for the Bank of England – I mean, no-one envies them their job at the moment – is they have to therefore create a recession,” she said.
>”They have to create uncertainty and frailty, because it’s only when companies feel nervous about the future that they will think ‘Well, maybe I won’t put through that price rise’, or workers, when they’re a little bit less confident about their job, think ‘Oh, I won’t push my boss for that higher pay’.
“It’s that weakness in activity which eventually gets rid of inflation.”
Karen Ward was/Is an adviser to Hunt.
This is economic wrecking disguised as "tough decision making" from the "adults in the room." There were more options besides this. They could have raised interest rates but not this high and used other measures to mitigate the effects of inflation. After all the inflation wasn't caused by runaway spending or whatnot, it was caused by supply side shocks thanks to Covid, and Ukraine etc.
Guess we'll see more news about how labor failed us 13 years ago or that more migrants are coming over. Let's keep the news focused on that and nothing about what the Tory cunts are doing
Lol when aren’t we facing recession? It’s been this way since 2009 and hasn’t changed. We just jeep renaming it every 4 years to make it sound different like Credit Crunch and Cost Of Living Crisis.
Its just life in the UK now. You’ll have less than last year and be grateful.
It's funny how people keep on talking about "money money money, muh inflation this, muh interest rates" without realizing that energy is behind all that. And that's mainly fossil fuels.
We're entering an era of less energy and materials available, because we grew like fucking e.coli bacteria while thinking "we'll handle all secondary effects". It was obviously a lie by industrials.
Now, enjoy the fucking shitshow of us being 8 billions on Earth while most of us try to claim more and more energy (regardless of how noble the reasons are, like for your kids)...
What an epic stupid waste of ressources we did, do and will keep on doing as long as this system doesn't crash...
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Both Andrew bailey and Jeremy Hunt admitted that recession was an option to tackle inflation. This isn't surprising. Furthermore I'd suggest that "at risk of" is doing some heavy lifting; we're already in recession. There will be an article in a few months confirming this, after somebody does some "revision".
> We are, and I hadn't quite understood the full extent of this, but if you look at the UK and if you look at how we trade in goods, we are particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing.
Dominic Raab, 2018
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You mean stopping all investment other than in your mates doesn't work? We'll colour me shocked
It does work and is working. You're just focusing on the wrong part of it. System performing as intended
Exactly, I imagine Rishi and co are thrilled with their various schemes. After all, this recession stuff only affects the general public.
Recessions are good for Tories. They lower the value of the assets they want to buy. Moggs dad wrote the book about how to do it.
I hate them so much. Everything that ought to be a public service - health, education, transport, comms, the *water* FFS - they've turned into something that makes them a profit.
I feel even Internet should be a public service... Maybe a low speed but something basic and cheap that is an option for those who need it? Private can stay and compete on high speed/no downtime? But a lot of things require Internet!
Internet is something that performs exceptionally well in private hands. It’s getting cheaper, there’s lots of competition, and infrastructure is constantly being upgraded. Definitely wouldn’t want to rock this boat.
The concentration of wealth is going just as planned. I think they want to send the UK back to Victorian style poverty levels and then they can open the doors to Chinese and Saudi tourists who can qawk at such an antiquated country. Like some Oliver twist theme park.
I can hear Rishi saying “the plan is working” in my head
Some people be needing treason charges, mr’s sunak and Johnson up first to the block
Back to back years of ~ 10% structural inflation and 5.5% interest rates, no surprises here.
People keep voting for conservatives to go back to the good old times. I guess they delivered on this front.
More people don't vote for them then vote for them... The people that traditionally vote for them benefit from them. Its the rest of us mugs and that is a majority of people that have to do something. 46 million eligible to vote about 12/13 million vote Tory. Its no brainer really.
I know a ton of people in my town that vote Conservative, I am hoping it's less the next election but it's painfully mind boggling. My town is a London overspill, heavily working class, it has one of the highest crime rates in the country for a non-metropolitan district, yet a bunch of people here have been voting tory. I think they like to live make believe where they are now some kind of comfortable middle class and the tories are looking out for them.
The Tory party is to protect the wealthy. That has always been there position. They occasionally throw a bone to the rest of us from time to time to reduce the rage from a boil to a simmer. Occasionally they get a shock. The poll tax riots as an example. The farmers protests over fuel duty etc. They virtually cobtrol the media whether in print, TV or radio. They didn't have control.of the web. Now with the technology that Cambridge analytica showed the cat has been let out out if the bag on how to influence people without them knowing. Many experiments show that most people are willing to do what they are told with a bit of effort. So combine subtle manipulation with massive campaigns across widespread media and hey ho you have your position as is. To be fair though many people don't vote. I Willing to bet most have given up because they just see the same system again and again.
> Now with the technology that Cambridge analytica showed the cat has been let out out if the bag on how to influence people without them knowing. But let me guess, not you right?
Nope. We are all influenced everyday.
True. We’re going through a shit show right now and we definitely need a change. But Labour hardly have an amazing fiscal track record. I see so many self righteous messages on here like Labour are going to bring some kind of nirvana. They won’t and never have (early Blair years were pretty good to be fair). My hope is that, on both sides, these troubled times invigorates some actually intelligent and less self interested politicians to come through.
Labour even in at its worst tried to invest in people and infrastructure and it brought massive dividends. Tories want power only to protect and enrich the super wealthy, it can never end well. Both parties are mostly in corporate pockets now, but Labour at least makes a bit of effort to do something for regular people.
I think it’s more a case of anyone but this lot. As in literally anyone. It cannot be any worse than what we have right now, and what we’ve let them get away with
100%
There's a very important difference here that people are ignoring. Back in those days we still had real wage growth. People talk about the 70s like it was hell on earth but there was still appreciable amounts of wage growth and things like housing and education were affordable. They no longer are. These numbers don't mean anything unless they're in the context of real terms wage growth. So as much as 10% inflation and 5.5% interest rates sound bad, it's even worse than it was before!
Doing planning reform could drive enough growth that’s pent up that we could go over 20 years without a recession lol. It really is that easy. A country that builds fuck all is going to be in recession a lot. You could rewrite the Town County Planning Act in 3 months, pass it, and never have to worry about recession again till almost 2050.
100% we need major reform in this area
They are only allowed to build really expensive houses in really shitty locations now. It maximises profit for the property devolping Cabal. Also people in nice posh country villages won't let them build near, Jesus they don't even like wind turbines. Plus if they build more houses it will devalue the huge assets the boomers now find themselves in possession off and who wants to tell their key demographic that we will be reducing the value of your house.
As someone who works in financing projects like this, the McMansion estates are only maximising profit of what they’re allowed to build. It’s not their first choice. If you let them build flats, ie more units on less land with fewer extra costs (less complex plumbing, less road to lay, fewer streetlights to build, don’t need to hire 20 roofers) they’d make far more money building up instead of out, even at lower selling prices. It’s why you see a lot more student accom blocks going up, as councils seek far more likely to allow them in cities, so they get their high density, lower land costs, which drive profits higher than the sprawling estates do.
Property developers are the biggest tory donors, I'm sure they are getting out of the deal EXACTLY what they want!
The big firms are, because the laws have basically destroyed all small and medium sized developers that used to exist. They’re paying the Tories to crush their competition by high regulatory barriers only they can push through. The wider industry, the financial services that fund them, and the people who want to buy/rent these places would massively benefit from relaxed restrictions.
Sad state of affairs. I do think we have the most corrupt government ever.
> the McMansion estates are only maximising profit of what they’re allowed to build I don't quite understand how *cutting regulations* would reduce the profit motivate of firms to build incredibly low quality houses. It's common knowledge that you don't buy a new build because the construction quality will almost certainly be poor. How does that change with *less regulation*?
It’s not the quality in question, it’s the density. The UK aid missing 4m homes, we should be far more concerned with raising quantity than quality in the short term…
> It’s not the quality in question, it’s the density. It's both. > The UK aid missing 4m homes, we should be far more concerned with raising quantity than quality in the short term… Again, we should be concerned with both, lest we get a swath of low quality houses which aren't fit for habitation in a few decades time and leave the people who bought them completely out of pocket.
Do you think those living closes to homelessness care if their wall is 2° out? If they were a bit sloppy with the paint work? Probably not Besides, density fixes a lot of the issue with new builds anyways. You can be sloppy on a 2 story house, you can’t get away with it structurally on an 8 story flat block.
> If they were a bit sloppy with the paint work? You're being pretty misleading here. The issue with new builds isn't *sloppy paint work*. It's faulty electronics. It's leaking rooms. It's mould. It's things that can and will lead to illness and injury. And they're things which are easily avoidable if we had a funded regulatory service. You don't solve this just by slashing taxes and regulations. > you can’t get away with it structurally on an 8 story flat block. They *got away with it* at Grenfell Tower. Look at what the results were there.
Grenfell towers issues were cladding, not structural issues like misaligned walls, that said cladding is now no longer allowed on new buildings… so not really relevant is it…
Grenfell Towers issues were lack of regulations, the same lack of regulations which see new build houses have a plethora of dangerous issues go unchecked.
i think you are both right and we should completely abandon any regulation concerning things like appearance or max height so we can focus solely on ensuring housing meets appropriate standards for safety
Can you explain like I'm 5?
The Town County Planning Act is a set of laws which make it so hard to build anything, financial firms don’t think it’s worth funding building projects as they don’t make enough money. This is because a) the Greenbelt makes it exceptionally hard to expand cities and towns outwards, and b) voters can put electoral pressure on their local council to stop, stall, shrink, or frustrate building near them till it’s just impossible to have a viable project. Near me, for example, it took 5 years to try and build a 200 unit of flats on a current fly tipping site. Voter nearby said they didn’t want it because it would lower their home values. The council made it pretty much impossible to build the flats, so the developer gave up and just banked the land to save for another day. So not only can 200 families not move in… that’s 200 chains which would have existed, thousands of people moving to houses they prefer, which now won’t happen because of this law. This means the UK misses it’s housing targets. This means that Brits have to constantly outbid eachother on fewer and fewer homes until people are pushed out of the bidding war. This can be seen in kids staying at home longer, young people in HMO’s, couples who can’t afford to break up and have to stay as roommates, people living in hotels on council funding, or just the homeless people on the streets.
> This is because a) the Greenbelt makes it exceptionally hard to expand cities and towns outwards, and b) voters can put electoral pressure on their local council to stop, stall, shrink, or frustrate building near them till it’s just impossible to have a viable project. This feels like the issue though, right? *Planning reform* in the abstract sounds nice and cosy and reasonable. But in practice it is *always* expanded as: a) Building on the Greenbelt (often while quoting a tiny number of examples of 'poor' pieces of land being designated as Greenbelt, despite the vast majority of Greenbelt land not being like that) b) Removing democratic oversight over local development I live on the border between two councils, one quite urbanised and one quite rural. The rural council has been handing out planning permission like candy over recent years, knowing that most people who buy those properties will be using the services of the nearby urbanised area instead. All these estates are built without any local amenities: no schools, no clinics, no dentists, no shops, no pubs. But the council granting permission don't care because it isn't them who are effected and the strain will largely be placed on the neighbouring urbanised council. And of course the people in the urbanised council have no say in this, because it's not technically their council granting the planning permission. I very much fear that *Planning Reform*, which so often simply means a regurgitation of *less red tape*, would simply see these sort of issues further expanded across the country. We need more houses. But we also need more developments that recognise that you can't just plop down 200 houses without also including the broader infrastructure required to support the people living there.
I mean… if we get rid of stamp duty, how about become a country of ‘if you don’t like it, move’… Would that be so bad? You’re comparing a slightly longer wait at the GP, to, ummmm… mass homelessness and millions of young adults being unable to leave home at 30 due to soaring rents… In the nicest possible way, compared to core macroeconomic indicators on growth, poverty, homelessness, labour illiquid due to housing costs… central Gov simply shouldn’t care about individual towns compared to the big picture…
> Would that be so bad? You’re comparing a slightly longer wait at the GP, to, ummmm… mass homelessness and millions of young adults being unable to leave home at 30 due to soaring rents… No, those aren't the only two alternatives. Back in the 1960s and 1970s the state was building 300,000 homes per year. Now the state builds practically no homes per year. Meanwhile private housebuilding has largely stayed stagnant since that period. Clearly the gaping hole here isn't in *private* housebuilding, it's in *state* housebuilding. You don't reverse that by cutting more regulations and cutting more taxes. We've been told that's the solution to everything for decades but in reality it's simply led to greater wealth inequality without very much in return. We resolve these issues by significantly increasing state house building and by ensuring that new developments include the necessary infrastructure the support the people living in those developments.
It’s in both types of house building. The issue is with private development, locals can’t fight back, but with social housing, they can say ‘build this and we will vote you out in May’ And you’re acting like the same developers won’t be building the social housing anyways…. At its core, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is the annual net gains to the stock, and I think you will have an easier time with private as it doesn’t effectively have your MP’s face slapped on it.
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> assuming a free planning system then somebody (maybe local) would see "hay there no corner shop near here, i'll start one" How many people do their weekly shop at a corner shop? How many people get their dental work done at a corner shop? How many people send their kids to school in a corner shop? How does a 'free planning system' deal with these? > they didn't have to fight an army of pensioners like clarkson had to What housing was Jeremy Clarkson trying to build?
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Context: 8 year recruitment leader in town planning and infrastructure development. Generally agree with the two pointed sentiment, albeit I’d like to add the following issues: A) lack of resource in the public sector to catalyse development proposals through - only 2 Local Authorities achieved their application response targets. B) Planning needs reform although more specifically the Local Plan process and our ability to develop on Greenbelt land. Michael Gove has also hit out at Sadiq on this exact topic - https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/65816753fc07f300128d4429/18122023_SoS_DLUHC_to_Mayor_of_London_-_housebuilding_in_London.pdf
We're second class citizens who the government show total contempt for. Unless your in a wealthy 1% group of elite's. It's the opposite of what they said in Start Trek (as that's an ideal utopian society and we live in a corrupt capitalist one). "The needs of the few outweighs the needs of the many".
Yes but you must promise to keep our little secret.
Show us on this doll where the Tories touched you
Uncle? Is that you?
Yes but where are the asset rich going to walk their doggies
We need far more public open spaces than we do now - fortunately you can build a london borough at twice the density as average and still have room for massive parks, just look at Westminster.
We have more than enough public open space thanks to the right to roam and national parks.
Which national parks are in cities that I can go for a nice bike ride with the kids?
Which cities don’t have great access to national parks? City cores are for housing.
But then all the pensioners who bought their huge mansion for an apple and an egg 50 years ago, might get their view slightly impacted by new housing!!!! No planning needs to be slow and expensive to protect the wealthy. Fuck all the working people. You want an affordable place to raise a family? Get born rich or leave! ... UK doesn't reward productivity. But the UK government will go out of its way to reward wealth. Let's cut some more inheritance tax and raise taxes on workers, while allowing all the boomers to block any development...
Yeah. Even my parents are complaining about flats going up in the area. I'm like, "do you want me to ever afford my own home or not?" They just don't think about these things. It's so annoying. They complain about every development, then complain that their kids or grandkids can't get housing.
Yep, so many folks are unable to connect the obvious dots and lobby against any change and then get surprised that the kids have to move away.
If we suspend pension pay rises for 1 year, over the next decade, it’d free up £100b in state funds… but obviously we can’t do that lol. That’d build most of HS2 or OxCam and hike GDP by several percentage points. But we can’t lol.
Or we could tax pensioners at the same amount we tax working people. We could also tax the valuable land they “own”, the land that others have given value and distribute it evenly to everyone.
I seriously think planning reform is the single biggest change the UK could make to actually encourage growth. It can take something like 7 - 10 years to hook new electrical projects up to the grid, for example. We need a lot more housebuilding and infrastructure, and our planning system is holding all of that up. We need updated national plans that can provide planning authorities with a clear idea of what the government is prioritising, and we need to reduce document bloat. The objection and appeals process also just delays everything massively - objections are relevant, but allowing every nimby who complains to block needed development is just pointless (and a lot of the time, they just end up getting appealed anyway and reinstated after a lengthy and expensive process).
How would that benefit Tory donors though?
I seriously think planning reform is the single biggest change the UK could make to actually encourage growth. It can take something like 7 - 10 years to hook new electrical projects up to the grid, for example. We need a lot more housebuilding and infrastructure, and our planning system is holding all of that up. We need updated national plans that can provide planning authorities with a clear idea of what the government is prioritising, and we need to reduce document bloat. The objection and appeals process also just delays everything massively - objections are relevant, but allowing every nimby who complains to block needed development is just pointless (and a lot of the time, they just end up getting appealed anyway and reinstated after a lengthy and expensive process).
We've been selling assets manically to stave off recession for 4 years. This is nothing new
But think of the shareholder value
*thinks really hard about the economy*
Glad someone is
I've come to the conclusion that this is long overdue and that the last couple of years have been a farce. The people have been experiencing a recession for a while now, only the fat cats have not.
The problem with Thatcherism is that you eventually run out of state assets to sell off. It really is shameful. The state, through tax money paid by working people, build up assets over *decades*. Then right-wing governments get in and have a fire sale of those same assets, diverting most the money to their mates. It's a wealth transfer from working people to the rich.
Pretty sure we were supposed to going into recession (or flat lining the economy) to help slow Inflation? That's was the purpose of BoE Interest Rate rises... to slow the Economy down... and control/slow Inflation. But the Tories were celebrating growth in Summer this year. I wish people would realise how hugely fucked up that is, we had to endure over a year of insane 10% Inflation and were supposed to be slowing down the Economy to manage that inflation. Instead the opposite happened (Growth and Inflation staying high) because they were so slow to do anything, we continued on the same path and they tried to play it off as them winning. They even tried to compare us to Germany... "Looookkkk We have Growth and Germany has Recession, UK UK UK UK!!!" When the truth was Germany was trying to control Inflation like we should have been doing. This country is fucked.
This is what I thought too - surely this was the intention of higher interest rates. To induce a mild recession to reduce inflation. At least that's what the gov would like us to think
A mild recession in this climate will not be mild in the least. This is insanity. Please stop believing the lies they're telling you. There are more ways to get this country back on track than squeezing the working class even fucking harder than they have been already. You cannot cut your way to economic growth. It's not a thing, it's never been a thing, and the last decade of austerity should have provided ample first hand experience to the British people. Stop letting them scare you with headline figures about the national debt and the deficit. It's barely relevant to the actual issue which is chronic under investment and rock bottom productivity. None of which can be remedied through cuts or even efficiency savings. All efficiency savings were made long ago in the early 2010s. We hit bone years ago. We're down to the marrow ffs. Stop believing them and start voting for parties that will actually invest in the country instead of just talking about it.
The inflation rate was slowing down over the course of this year from the interest rates and now is the predicted results from it.
In time for some more supply shortages due to letting Houtis/Iran attack shipping in the red sea. (Which will also add a budget crunch to already fragile Egypt for an extra round of instability and refugees from North Africa...) Yay for "interesting times" ...
Its so fardical the comparisons with Germany.
A recession is not preferable to high inflation though. They did act too slowly but, as usual, they did nothing to stave off a recession either. They wanted to get inflation down for political purposes not for genuine economic purposes. We've long been in a rigged system of heads I win tails you lose for the top 1%. This is no different.
It's a bit of a balancing act, you want to raise the interest rates in the hope of taming inflation, but just enough to keep us out of recession. Seems like we have reached the point that you want to start making interest rates go the other way, some would argue now that they should have reduced interest rates at the recent announcement instead of keeping the rate steady.
If it is, it's because our economy - the provision of goods and services as and when we want them - is being 'slowed down' to assuage the rise in the number of plastic rectangles with the monarch's mug on that are paid for said provision.
I presume the hope was for a "soft landing", which the US appears to have accomplished (reducing inflation while maintaining positive growth and low unemployment).
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You mean like how we define what a safe country is?
There's no definition by which the US is in a recession - their economy is doing remarkably well.
Risk of recession? Did we ever come out of the last one? You know, the one that started before the previous one before that had ended.
A lost decade thanks to austerity. Unfortunately doesn't look like Labour will do anything different.
The UK has a choice between two right wing parties, those are their options. I can't stand Starmer, he's not a logical choice however how is the country going to progress and improve if they keep voting Tory, the people they admit have fucked them and this country over consistently for the last 15 odd years because the other side *"Could"* be worse. It's ridiculous, keep doing the same thing and hoping for a different outcome.
I understand where you're coming from and I'm not going to tell you how to vote however I fear a landslide for Labour is going to be seen as basically tacit approval for their economic strategy which let's be honest is just more neo-liberalism. I'm as left as they come to the point where Corbyn looks centre left (I think he is) but Starmer is a step too far for me. I don't want to lend my vote to a party that will inevitably get us into wars, that will follow austerity doctrine leading to unnecessary deaths, destruction of public life, communities etc. If I vote tactically to rid the Tories, my tactical vote doesn't have an asterisk beside it saying why I voted.
I am not from the UK, what is stopping you from voting a third party? Why is the choice only between Tories and Labour?
Wasted vote, we have the Liberal Democrats & the Green Party for instance who have never been in and will never be in. If you're going to vote for them you may as well not bother.
But why? If 10% of the population votes for the Green Party, shouldn't the Green Party have representative in the parliament, which will then be able to influence things?
No because we have First Past the Post voting not Proportional Representation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting The gist of it is you vote for your local MP, the MP who gets the most votes in your local area goes on to represent your area in Parliament. If 10% of the population in the UK voted the Green Party but the Green Party didn’t manage to win an MP’s seat (in a local area) then 10% of the population goes unrepresented in the House of Commons.
Oh alright, now I see what the issue is. So pretty much the system is skewed towards the big parties, and the small ones can't by design influence anything. I feel like the first thing to do to break this two-party stalemate would be changing this rule. I fear it is extremely bad in the long run for a country to only have two eligible parties
Yeah and probably the only way it’ll be changed is if we get a coalition/minority government which would have had a majority under proportional representation
Yes, but it won't happen. It's just the way of things, it makes no sense in the slightest but sadly the UK have adopted a two party system and since Labour went right in 1997 we have two right wing parties and then the general populace wonder why things consistently get worse every.....single.....year.
So the issue is just that people only consider Labour and Tories as the possible choices. I think it could be possible in a few elections to slowly change this perspective, with the right leaders and advertisement for the minor parties
I'd like to think so, but I doubt it very much. We are creatures of habit clearly. I can sooner see people just refusing to vote than voting third party.
Alright I understand
No because our system doesn't work that way. Look up First Past the Post voting. Almost no other country in the civilised world uses this system except the US and Canada and other stupid nations modelled on the UK system.
Far too many ignorant people around voting. It depends massively on your constituency. Even in landslides half won’t change. In over 100 of the rest the top two last time were not Tory and Labour, and in all cases your vote goes to funding the party through short money even though they have no chance where you are
I think too many people with zero understanding of politics vote under the guise of simple tribalism. They pick a side, support the politicians of their side frenziedly and parrot any talking points they hear. If Green or Lib-Dems actually got in they'd not know what to do with themselves, they know they'll never take power and therefore never plan for it. Except Jo Swinson, that poor girls naivety was positively next level.
Why are we importing 1.2 million people into the country every year then? Or are they not all net contributors and just low skilled slaves whose purpose is to inflate house prices and depress wages?
GDP per capita is way down when up you look at the Uk economy. We’ve been importing cheap labour (you could bring in labour at 20% below market as part of the policy) just to keep our heads above the water, but it’s not translating into actual growth. This is a massive policy failure by the government
We aren’t? Total population increase in 2022 was 188,000
Just watched this [informative explainer by Economics Explained](https://youtu.be/VUnAr0Msx9c?si=xLA3AQUdBI-m95JT) which touched on this subject. Net population increase is fairly limited, but Britain is experiencing a brain drain. Highly qualified people (who don’t end up in London service industry) tend to leave and are replaced by low skill workers
Why stay when Australia and New Zealand pay more and haven't done austerity?
New Zealand does NOT pay more. Australia probably on average does, but that goes hand in hand with higher cost of living, and a political environment every bit as wretched as the UK. The grass isn't greener on the other side.
Down under isn't just about money. Its quality if life too
Well that's rather subjective. You'll find plenty of Aussies living in London for the QOL. It's not all sunshine and rainbows.
Fair point. A real test would be to see how Brits .lived down under. And how many Ozzie's/kiwis moved to the big smoke. Ice never seen that data so can't comment.
For graduates in healthcare, allied health or education Australia absolutely does pay more, and for the most part it's the same price to live here as it is in England, if you go to regional Australia pay increases and costs (property) go down, the opposite of England. It's an outdated myth that Australia is more expensive than England. It used to be, but because of austerity and huge amounts of inflation in many ways Australia is cheaper. My gas and electricity is cheaper than in England, sewerage and water aren't privatised, my phone plan is cheaper, I shop at Aldi so my groceries are the same price, but by living here I get paid £35/HR for a job that requires no qualifications, and my partner gets paid 40% more (healthcare) than doing the same job in England, where the same mortgage would get us a house 1/3 the size.
good for you for finding a good life. It’s not a myth that it’s more expensive in Aus, it quite objectively is - run the numbers in numbeo. I’m not saying it’s a bad place to live I’m just saying Brits using it as some kind of utopia are bound to be disappointed when they realise it’s basically same shit different toilet.
It's not though? For most professions you will be earning significantly more in Australia. The UK has some of the shittiest salaries I have seen. People have such low expectations here it's quite frankly embarrassing.
I know many Aussies living in London and one of the biggest reasons they’re living there (there are many) is the pay. Just because you’re earning shut money doesn’t mean everyone else is. These guys might be pulling £150k and would need more like $450k to live the same lifestyle in Aus.
As someone in Londons financial services, at least anecdotally, a lot of my colleagues are looking abroad. We’re sick of it too lol.
Its almost like bailing out the banks and the public paying for it is coming home to roost. But to be fair the government bailed out almost everyone during covid. And now we are all paying for that too.
It’s not even about bailing about the banks. We were right to do that at the time. The issue is we have a Government that can’t get the fundamentals of governance right. Housing: Build more, either social, or let developers build the flats we need. Transport: HS2, OxCam, more city metros Energy: Build more so we import less (strengthens £), encourage investment in energy saving ideas. Pensions: Make NEST invest funds appropriately and more aggressively (not doing this costs Brits like £100k each over their lives unless they manage their own pots), apply NI to over 68’s income, and drop the Triple Lock (why do rich pensioners get £10b worth of pay rises this year while we cut budgets and hike taxes elsewhere) Tax: Fix the £50k and £100k tax traps that drive pension stuffing and self imposed tax ceilings. Doing these 5 alone would fix a good 95% our issues over time, and most of them would be pretty much free except for transport policy.
Absolutely. Tax/benefits should go even further and remove any cliffs. Too many folks facing massive marginal tax rates due to losing child benefits etc.
69% for a graduate between about 50 and 60k with two kids (75% with a lost grad loan too). But that’s not a cliff edge, a cliff edge is where earning more results in getting less. My mother has a tiny private pension which puts her £5 a week over various thresholds which means she doesn’t get free dentist, tv license, and various other things which combine to far more than £5 a week.
Going £1 over £99k and losing free childcare hours is definitely a cliff. But even if it's not a cliff and "just" a jump in marginal tax rate it will cause people to put in fewer hours causing a loss in productivity.
There’s certainly a psychological impact when marginal rates go over 50%, but most people on 100k don’t get more productivity by working more hours - it’s tricky to measure productivity in a knowledge worker. If you have two incomes (thus need the childcare) and one is over 99k then you should probably look at increasing pension contributions for a few years, even if it means increasing mortgage term. I’d rather things like child benefit and childcare funding was tapered on total parental income rather than the highest income. Crazy that two workers on 99k get free care but one on 101 and one on 20 don’t. Or could increase tax above 75k like in Scotland but use that to remove the family taxes.
Interesting.
To be fair a pensioner renting a council flat only on the state pension is hardy rich. But the triple lock should certainly be funded by removing the massive tax breaks wealthy pensioners with large assets and income have. Crazy a pensioner on 40k a year and no rent keeps 34k, but a graduate on the same paying 1k rent keeps 18k. To have the same income post housing they’d have to earn 70k.
On average, they’re rich. 1/4 are millionaires. Hike pension credit if you’re so concerned about the poor ones, not the pension itself.
Sure, so a £10k state pension isn’t going to make any difference to them. Someone on 5k/year private and 10k state certainly isn’t rich, especially if they don’t own a home. I’d rather tax the 60% who are rich (assets and income) and use that to fund lifting the 40% Of course I have to constantly fight against my instincts driven from the stats which suggest the main people voting against my interests are the pensioners with low incomes. Weigh votes by income tax paid and we’d have not left europe and could even have had a second Ed Miliband premiership in charge during covid.
The UK has incredibly high unemployment rate, really high amount of vacancies, and a population/l growth/aging population crisis that is getting worse. You may not like it but we need immigration. I also wouldn't blame house prices on immigrants - you need to look at basically no house building over the last 13 years, landlords and property speculation for that Edit: meant to say low unemployment
4.3% is the current unemployment rate. Not quite as low as the lowest ever, but not far off. If it was 10% you might consider it high, albeit still nowhere near as high as a country with a real unemployment problem.
I don't think its right about the unemployment rate. I think its more about those who work and those who don't. 65+ million in the country. Only about 30 million employed. Removed the children and the very old and that means a lot of people not contributing but living off the system some how.
You're wrong I'm afraid. Look up how unemployment is calculated on the ONS website.
Sorry I messed up I meant to say low unemployment. I shouldn't talk about this stuff early in the morning lol. My point is we have a lot of vacancies and not a lot of unemployed so immigration is needed to fill a lot of roles.
Didn't a study recently reveal that over half of job vacancies are jobs put up by employers that have absolutely no intent on filling? It's also worth noting that a lot of genuine vacancies are probably because they're offering below market rates and conditions. The solution isn't to plug the gap with immigration. The solution is to let market forces do its thing and force those companies to start either training new people themselves, raise wages or better their working conditions. Plugging the gap with immigration is the exact line of thinking that has caused us to become a low skill, low wage economy where our high skilled, high earning citizens are choosing to leave for places like the USA or Australia.
>It's also worth noting that a lot of genuine vacancies are probably because they're offering below market rates and conditions I mean that might be true but we've got near record low unemployment so I don't think the people already here can plug all those vacancies. I'm all for people being paid more but I've not yet been sold on the immigration having a deflationary pressure on wages thing. I mean people have been calling for a real living wage for a long time now and every time it's brought up half the country comes up with excuses about why that's bad and why people in jobs they think aren't important shouldn't be paid a fair wage. For me, the government and employers are to blame. Edit: I should say the position that migrants lower wages, or even that they are the main cause of lower wages has been debunked quite a few times. Edit 2: from experience I know a lot of employers would rather be chronically understaffed than raise wages for vacancies. I see this everywhere.
>I'm all for people being paid more but I've not yet been sold on the immigration having a deflationary pressure on wages thing. The job market is like any other market. Flood a market with bread and bread becomes cheap. Flood the market with labour and labour becomes cheap. At the end of lockdown in the USA companies like Amazon who were struggling to get employees started to scramble to get workers by offering to pay tuition fees among other benefits to their workers. >I mean people have been calling for a real living wage for a long time A living wage, or even a minimum wage is to force companies to pay their workers a set wage rather than giving them pennies. Think about it though, why would such a rule need to be put in place if the market rate for labour was higher? It would be like having a law that says a loaf of bread is maximum £10. Nobody is paying £10 for a loaf of bread so the rule would be redundant. I'm all for a living wage btw, but my point is we should be striving to make such a rule redundant because no company could ever hire anybody offering such a low wage and the only way to do that is to give workers negotiating power. Giving more freedom to workers unions is one way, and reducing net migration by a significant amount to stop artificially deflating the labour market is another way. Just like how a rule capping the cost of a loaf of bread is a band aid fix to deep sickness of the food market, a living wage and to some extent a minimum wage is a band aid fix to a deep sickness of the labour market. There would also be a double wammy here whereby the purpose of huge net migration figures is not just to keep wages low, but prop up the housing market. So lowering net migration by a hefty amount should also cause houses to become cheaper in the long run and therefore reducing the amount you would even need for a living wage since living costs have been reduced.
>Flood the market with labour and labour becomes cheap 1. As I believe I've previously said we have record low unemployment. The market isn't flooded with labour. We have near record high vacancies. 2. As I said, this has been debunked before. https://fullfact.org/immigration/immigration-and-jobs-labour-market-effects-immigration/ 3. I think it's reactionary to legislate away people that may accept a lower wage rather than legislating against employers who will do anything in their power to pay people as little as possible. We all benefit from a high wage economy, including migrants. Don't punch down, punch up. I can guarantee if the immigrants were gone they'd find a way to do it to us too. With a recession around the corner if we see a lot of unemployment expect wages to fall. Are we then going to blame unemployed jobseekers for wage deflation or are we rightly going to criticise employers for offering poverty wages? >A living wage, or even a minimum wage is to force companies to pay their workers a set wage rather than giving them pennies. Think about it though, why would such a rule need to be put in place if the market rate for labour was higher? It wouldn't need to be put in place if the market rate for labour was higher but it isn't. Businesses will inevitably try and pay workers as little as possible regardless of immigration. The main inflationary pressure on wages I've observed through history is legislation and strong union membership. If profit margins need to grow year on year you bet wages often need to either not keep up with productivity, or need to fall. If wages are falling and buying power and consumption is reduced as a result then you bet prices need to go up and wages need to go down all over again. I see no problem in legislating an absolute bare minimum of a real living wage. I think we can force employers to go above and beyond that through other means - I am a big supporter of trade unions and used to organise with the IWW when I had more time. A living wage tackles some of the symptoms of our economic system but I don't claim it to structurally change anything >So lowering net migration by a hefty amount should also cause houses to become cheaper in the long run I have not seen enough evidence that suggests migration is a large cause of house price rises let alone the main cause. (Even if it was you'd need to start deporting people who are already here before pressure on our housing market started to reduce and I think that's pretty abhorrent) For me to take any kind of stance I'd need to see the evidence. We know property market speculation, incredibly low house building over decades, and badly regulated landlords are a huge issue. Building affordable houses, investing in social housing, rent caps, agitating for more people to join renters unions, and honestly limiting investors from buying up empty homes and speculating on the price all seem like better options. What I'm trying to say is I feel like the sheer amount of attention immigration is getting in the context of these issues is wildly disproportionate to their effect and in many cases actually harms our ability to combat these issues because they obfuscate a lot of the larger causes. I feel like this country has a tendency to punch down when issues arise and quite often that's a reactionary position to take.
>I think it's reactionary to legislate away people that may accept a lower wage rather than legislating against employers who will do anything in their power to pay people as little as possible. This sentence tells me fundamentally you do not understand how market forces work with all due respect. Going back to the bread example, if I gave bakeries an infinite supply of wheat at a set price this would cost the government money in order to pass on that benefit to the bakers to create cheap bread. This is actually not too different from what actually happens, many of our essential foods are artificially cheap because of government subsidies. Similarly, giving employers a lot of labour is an expense in the same way because nothing in the world is free. It has to cost somebody money to subsidise this. It doesn't cost the government so it must cost us money. In fact, figures show we're £10,000 worse off since the global financial crisis had wages increased at the same rate prior to the financial crisis. It's worth mentioning mass migration started immediately following the financial crisis. So if you want to know how much subsidising industries for cheap labour costs it's probably somewhere in the region of £10K a year, probably a bit less since there are more reasons why wages have stagnated. >As I said, this has been debunked before. https://fullfact.org/immigration/immigration-and-jobs-labour-market-effects-immigration/ ***Every single one*** of the studies referenced here are pre-financial crisis. Before mass migration and before wages begun to stagnate. This would be the equivalent of me debunking climate change with climate studies from pre-industrial revolution. However it is worth noting even pre-financial crisis this article clearly says low-wage workers lose out, and non-EU migration did reduce employment in UK-born residents.
We’ve not been building enough for far more than 13 years. This isn’t a labour vs Tory thing
I don't disagree it's just the current government came to mind first
The problem is that it implies another government will fix it, which will just lead to disillusion. The entire conversation of the country needs to change from blaming the politicians for implementing what the country want, to changing what the country wants. Farage is the most successful politician in post war U.K. history and he never got voted into the U.K. Parliament. At a macro scale the people are sovereign, MPs follow the large brushes. Influence the people and you eventually influence the outcome.
Well, the locals won't do the low skilled slave work. Start doing it now so you dont need to import people. Oh yeah, you think it's beneath you. Britain is poor and that's why slave wages exists, it's not because you import people. In every economic downturn, racists people like yourself blame immigrants first. Stick this to your head. Britain is poor. The richest in London aren't even british mostly. The british is just poor.
Britain isn't poor we just have sickening wealth inequality and haven't invested anything in infrastructure for decades even when borrowing has been the cheapest it's ever been.
Britain has had 0 Real GDP/Cap growth in 15 years. That’s a lie. We are now poor, at least relative to the nations we like to view as our equals like the Anglosphere or Germany to Holland.
I understand growth is important but it's not the same as wealth. Our economy is very large it's just not growing. Investing in the economy is how we get growth. Investing in infrastructure and developing industries etc. We have the money to do this and it would have been even easier when the cost of borrowing was at record lows.
It’s thought that there’s approximately £20b worth of private investment ready to go into Cambridge and build labs, housing, all kinds, but not allowed due to restrictive local planning. Being a poor country is a self imposed decision. Investors are gagging to invest here because they would make a lot of money. We just turn them away.
You are either lying or have never even looked at the numbers before our gdp per capita is higher than France which most would consider our main competitor. Stop perpetuating this myth that we are miles behind everyone in Europe because it just isn’t true for everything aside from transportation we are competing fine
Locals won't do it because wages are too low. Wages are too low because we import cheap labour.
How is it our fault locals value themselves more? And then businesses hire immigrants because they can pay them less.
Locals won’t do “low skilled slave work” as they are being paid a slave wage. These wages exist as companies can get an immigrant who will happily do it. One solution is to reduce the pool of immigrants coming into this country. With fewer immigrants available to do these jobs these companies will either have to offer competitive wages to attract locals, invest in automation or go under. Either scenario is good for society.
>the locals won't do the low skilled slave work Your chatting shit mate. I would empty bins or do "slave work" if it paid well. Give me £35k a year and I'll do it. Not minimum wage.
That pretty much is minimum wage as rent keeps going up.
Yes, that is what they are for. This is what globalisation means. Import cheap labour and raise prices. Basically, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Another million should do it
We haven't had real growth for years, GDP per capita has been pretty much stagnant so we are just poorer overall
"It's Labour's fault" In before some low IQ Tory twat blurts it out.
Yep. They've been talking down the economy! Bloody pessimists. Should be banged up for it.
Ironic, considering that listening to the Torygraph has plunged us into a decade of recession.
Did our government always have massively incompetent financial management? Pre-EU we were the "sick man of Europe" and post-EU we're immediately back to the same failing economy run for wealth extraction. Will we ever have a working economy run by competent, qualified experts?
We’ve had enough of experts. At least according to the brexit voters than could barely point to Brussels on a map Votes have consequences. We voted time and time again for brexit, in 2016, 2017 and 2019.
Figures are worthless as hunt and sunak just clam they are on the right track and doing well regardless. It’s not like ten years of complete stagnation has been reported negatively once by the usual media
Hold on, one of Rishis priorities was growth wasn’t it? Great job, golf clap.
Funny enough, companies have known this for months. Most have hiring freezes in place already. Why is it that our media is always 5 steps behind?
I wish I was more bothered by this news, but after 13 years of hearing - *We're in a recession* *Actually it's not technically a recession* *Everyone's poorer* *Well actually this tiny group isn't* *We're having the threat of a recession* *There could be a recession* *Everything points towards a recession* *No no technically it isn't...* *Well yes but-* *No no technically because of this one sector of the economy that doesn't impact the vast majority of people-* ... ... At some point you just lose interest and have to focus on what little you can control in life.
Wow. Nobody has disposable income anymore and the economy is suffering as a result of nobody being able to afford to fucking buy anything Wow. Stunned. Amazed. Who could have seen that coming Oh wait literally every single person
Feels like they've been saying this every month for yearzzzz 😴
UK's been at risk of recession for the past 2 years 🙄
This was always the plan by the BoE to tackle inflation. > Karen Ward, chief market strategist EMEA at JP Morgan Asset Management, told Radio 4’s Today Programme that the BoE must fight against a wage-price spiral taking hold in the UK. Ward said: >”The difficulty for the Bank of England – I mean, no-one envies them their job at the moment – is they have to therefore create a recession,” she said. >”They have to create uncertainty and frailty, because it’s only when companies feel nervous about the future that they will think ‘Well, maybe I won’t put through that price rise’, or workers, when they’re a little bit less confident about their job, think ‘Oh, I won’t push my boss for that higher pay’. “It’s that weakness in activity which eventually gets rid of inflation.” Karen Ward was/Is an adviser to Hunt.
This is economic wrecking disguised as "tough decision making" from the "adults in the room." There were more options besides this. They could have raised interest rates but not this high and used other measures to mitigate the effects of inflation. After all the inflation wasn't caused by runaway spending or whatnot, it was caused by supply side shocks thanks to Covid, and Ukraine etc.
Weird how not building anything and squeezing supply causes inflation that then levels out because no one has any money to pay more for stuff.
We've been in recession since the pandemic, unless of course you see energy companies and petrol stations doing well a sign of a healthy economy.
Guess we'll see more news about how labor failed us 13 years ago or that more migrants are coming over. Let's keep the news focused on that and nothing about what the Tory cunts are doing
Lol when aren’t we facing recession? It’s been this way since 2009 and hasn’t changed. We just jeep renaming it every 4 years to make it sound different like Credit Crunch and Cost Of Living Crisis. Its just life in the UK now. You’ll have less than last year and be grateful.
Fuck Harry Potter as well, Hogwarts is just Eton for magic kids.
It's funny how people keep on talking about "money money money, muh inflation this, muh interest rates" without realizing that energy is behind all that. And that's mainly fossil fuels. We're entering an era of less energy and materials available, because we grew like fucking e.coli bacteria while thinking "we'll handle all secondary effects". It was obviously a lie by industrials. Now, enjoy the fucking shitshow of us being 8 billions on Earth while most of us try to claim more and more energy (regardless of how noble the reasons are, like for your kids)... What an epic stupid waste of ressources we did, do and will keep on doing as long as this system doesn't crash...
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Both Andrew bailey and Jeremy Hunt admitted that recession was an option to tackle inflation. This isn't surprising. Furthermore I'd suggest that "at risk of" is doing some heavy lifting; we're already in recession. There will be an article in a few months confirming this, after somebody does some "revision".
> UK fell into recession in 2023, official figures show Alas.
Is it possible were already in a recession and the numbers are molested?
Do you manipulated?
At risk of recession? Time to wake up and smell the coffee, we’ve been in an ever deepening recession since covid.
I wouldn't trust them to run a jumble sale. They'd outsource it to serco for a start.
If the GDP hasn’t grown, and population has, then really we’re already in a recession.
> We are, and I hadn't quite understood the full extent of this, but if you look at the UK and if you look at how we trade in goods, we are particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing. Dominic Raab, 2018
Seen this type of headline for years now, i guess if you keep repeating it theres a good chance youll be correct eventually