Sir Tony Blair Wades In To The Fray

BlueNomad said:
Good point. People shouldn’t be afraid of discussion. If we don’t have a common point of reference, it makes it very difficult to even get any serious discussion off the ground.

One of my primary concerns with the direction in which Britain appears to be heading (and is already far down the road) is that the level of taxation is already quite high, the level of public spending is higher, and the trajectory of the benefits system in Britain is in danger of bankrupting the country.

Accordingly, I fear the solutions under consideration are about simply outpacing the acceleration of benefits with taxation, rather than curtailing the growth of benefits (and possibly even reducing it) while finding better ways to cover the efficient delivery of benefits (including health, schooling, hard infrastructure, etc.) to the wider society in a way that is sustainable.

Good luck to us all. :-)
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I agree that we're in an entirely unsustainable downward loop. I don't think the benefits system is the cause though, I think it's a symptom; but that's the kind of 'next slide please' debate we should be having because for want of a more technical phrase there's some weird shit going on in this country right now.

One example, we have a significant mental health crisis in the working age population that is driving a large proportion of the increase in working age disability benefits. We'd be getting too off topic on the thread to go into detail but suffice to say there's some quite worrying statistics buried in the debate, like the fact that mortality rates in the 16-64 age group have never gone back down to pre-pandemic levels whereas the mortality rate in the older population has gone down. Stuff like the correlation, and increasing body of research on causation, between low income and mental health needs to be discussed too. In fact lots of stuff needs to be discussed and understood.

Anyway one last thing on tax to bring me ultimately back on topic. I have no interest in increasing the tax burden on 99% of the population, probably not even 99.3%

I'm interested in the UKs super rich because they, like our working age disability welfare budget, are outliers in comparison to many of their counterparts in other OECD countries. You pointed out earlier that people get rich but they also stimulate the economy and bring everyone up with them. Except increasingly in the UK they don't and if that's their 'job' the harsh truth is...

In comparison to many other countries, the UK super rich are (as a whole) rubbish at their job. In fact they are absolute wasters.

If you look at the UK super rich and compare them to many of their OECD counterparts, our rich own twice as much of the UKs wealth as many of their counterparts do of theirs and extract double the income and both of those numbers have risen inexorably. Yet at the same time we have a country with a moribund economy and diabolical productivity. Sure, successive governments have been useless but one of the main ways they've been useless is letting the super rich extract wealth rather than generate it. We're not the only country burdened with a rubbish set of super rich but we're one of the worst offenders. If capitalism isn't going to collapse into something very ugly the age of unproductive wealth extraction needs to come to an end.

I'm all for reform of the tax system to get the right behaviours :-)

So back to Tony Blair, what he chose to avoid in his missive was as telling as what he covered. So I'm afraid I'd put him in the category of the unproductive super rich!
 
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TinFoilHat said:
Who put 50p in Tony B.Liar?

A war criminal who ironically created a job of middle east peace envoy.

The Blair foundation he also created the limped dicked labour MPs we have now.
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In order to be a criminal you have to be convicted rather than merely accused of something. Blair says he has always deeply regretted the loss of life in Iraq but maintains he acted in good faith on the basis of the intelligence received.
 
BlueNomad said:
I doubt it is the “tax system” that keeps many in their home country, but rather what is done with said taxes!
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Usually a Tax Treaty will exist between the 2 Countries that spells out where and how taxation is levied.
Typically it ignores where it is sourced and lumps it all together to be paid in the Country where one lives most days of its financial year.
 
threespires said:
One example, we have a significant mental health crisis in the working age population that is driving a large proportion of the increase in working age disability benefits....
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This welfare issue is the elephant in the room given the ever rising proportion of people on incapacity benefit solely as a result of the mental health problems you mention. The relentless medicalization (and therefore monetization) of what have been long been considered everyday human reactions to life's difficulties has driven a fundamental change in the assessment of those in need of significant additional financial support. NEET benefit recipients have an even higher proportion in this category as a result of reframing reactions to social and economic hardships as clinical deficits.
 
johnny crossan said:
This welfare issue is the elephant in the room given the ever rising proportion of people on incapacity benefit solely as a result of the mental health problems you mention. The relentless medicalization (and therefore monetization) of what have been long been considered everyday human reactions to life's difficulties has driven a fundamental change in the assessment of those in need of significant additional financial support. NEET benefit recipients have an even higher proportion in this category as a result of reframing reactions to social and economic hardships as clinical deficits.
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I think if the hypothesis is we are "medicalising normal human emotions" then I think at most that's a fractional component of what going on. I think the reality is more complex and sadly requires more effort to reverse. I don't want to derail the thread further from it's focus so I'll try and find a more appropriate thread to explain why I think there's other bigger things driving the issue.
 
threespires said:
I think if the hypothesis is we are "medicalising normal human emotions" then I think at most that's a fractional component of what going on. I think the reality is more complex and sadly requires more effort to reverse. I don't want to derail the thread further from it's focus so I'll try and find a more appropriate thread to explain why I think there's other bigger things driving the issue.
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It's a very significant and growing fraction with critical implications for our welfare state and central to the issues raised in shaping the future direction of the Labour Party.
 
johnny crossan said:
It's a very significant and growing fraction with critical implications for our welfare state and central to the issues raised in shaping the future direction of the Labour Party.
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If you mean the issues Blair raised, I would strongly disagree. Imo it's a symptom of bigger problems rather than the underlying cause itself. Blair refuses to acknowledge the fact that as well as blighting lives, allowing high levels of inequality and wealth hoarding is a really poor choice for an economy because it actively stifles growth. Instead he indulges in vague waffle about the growth opportunities to be grasped through AI with absolutely no explanation of how that will be achieved for the benefit of the many rather than the few.
 
threespires said:
If you mean the issues Blair raised, I would strongly disagree. Imo it's a symptom of bigger problems rather than the underlying cause itself. Blair refuses to acknowledge the fact that as well as blighting lives, allowing high levels of inequality and wealth hoarding is a really poor choice for an economy because it actively stifles growth. Instead he indulges in vague waffle about the growth opportunities to be grasped through AI with absolutely no explanation of how that will be achieved for the benefit of the many rather than the few.
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Agree with all of that, the issue I identified is one he signally failed to address - as did Burnham in his reply or indeed Milburn in his re-emergence yesterday.

Simply put the problem is our current welfare spending is unaffordable now and cannot continue.
 
I’m of the opinion that Tony Blair is the best thing to happen to this country in my lifetime and our best PM since Churchill.

So very few people are desperate to give him the benefit of the doubt more than me.

I listened to his interview with Jon Sopel and he was so wide of the mark. He’s right about us needing to get growth so we can afford the social stuff but his ‘businesses and growth at all costs’ messaging and fanatical bullishness on AI was bordering on the hysterical. It sounded very Sunak-esque.

He’s also right about us needing policy before politics - but that’s a nice theory that doesn’t work in today’s poisonous attention economy. We need someone who can do big policy AND the politics and communications.

Ironically his intervention might actually galvanise the Labour Party and put a much needed rocket up their arse.
 
johnny crossan said:
Agree with all of that, the issue I identified is one he signally failed to address - as did Burnham in his reply or indeed Milburn in his re-emergence yesterday.

Simply put the problem is our current welfare spending is unaffordable now and cannot continue.
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At the risk of stating the bloody obvious it's a very very difficult problem for which there are no easy fixes. If you reasonably assume that borrowing simply to afford welfare spending is unsustainable and undesirable then it strikes me there two routes we can go down:

1. Simply reduce a variety of payments

Because I disagree with you about the degree to which it's simply a misdiagnosis crisis etc and I think it's more complex than that, I think this approach would have significant human and economic costs. Even if we took a callous "let the bodies pile up" approach, the chaos it would cause would balloon costs in other parts of the government's budgets I suspect.


2. Invest in programmes to reduce the number of people needing benefits in the first place

This second one gives us a chicken and egg dilemma, to invest we need a strong enough economy but to get a stronger economy we need as many people as practically possible to be productive in the economy. So what breaks us out of that downward spiral ?

Even with very credible plans with defendable projections about the impact it could have mid to long term on gdp/deficits etc the markets would charge very high premiums to support this, if at all. Meanwhile we have a situation where between 2011 and 2019 the wealth of the top 10% grew x 70 more than that of the average person! Despite the narratives we are in fact a very wealthy country it's just that much of the wealth is hopelessly concentrated and unproductive.

So to me there really is no other rational option than to start addressing the huge levels of inequality through tax reform. As I've already suggested, I believe the UK super rich are pretty rubbish as useful economic actors so they need to become more productive in the economy and this would be one way to make them much more productive and generate much needed investment in a country that has been systemically under invested in for decades now.

Labour seems pretty reluctant to go there but has anyone really got a better plan?

Blair hasn't, Milburn hasn't, I suspect Burnham hasn't. I'm not suggesting that it's easy either politically or technically but what other options exist?

The irony is that, strip away his ideology (his famed pragmatism I tend to think was something of a misdirection) and once upon a time Blair was a sufficiently good politician and communicator that he might have been able to carry the national debate needed.
 
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