The Labour Government

Manc in London said:
That's okay if you are going to London. Often, towns are not well linked. You also have to take into account that there is a lot of what many would regard as poor rural transport.
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You talk about towns, even the cities in the north dont have good links, never mind towns. With infrequent, often cancelled services. The local trains in most cases are knackered old cast offs from other routes in the home counties.
 
Kompany Car said:
You talk about towns, even the cities in the north dont have good links, never mind towns. With infrequent, often cancelled services. The local trains in most cases are knackered old cast offs from other routes in the home counties.
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I don't deny that the quality of transport in the north is crap. I was born, bred, school educated and employed there. I still 'experience' it to this day.

Yes, London has it better but the rest of the south does not.
 
Hmmm uninspiring again.

Spend a load of money the country hasn't got to kick stuff down the road for years and years.

Fuck all really for the north. How about sorting out the Trans Pennine line and as for airports out some money into small local ones like reopening Blackpool etc

But, what they really need to do is sort out national infrastructure, trains, potholes etc. we may see some growth if people can actually travel around the UK in a reasonable time.

Less said about the apparently indirect helping hand for the rags.... there's a lot of people with noses in troughs again.
 
I think the growth thing is more fundamental than current government policy, and tbf I felt the same when the Tories were in power. I think in the ‘developed world’, and especially Western Europe, economic growth is going to become increasingly hard to achieve, and I think we need to face up to that reality, hard as it will be. It’s simply a symptom of the decline of western hegemony, an ever ageing population and the next phase of capitalism.

I think most likely it will eventually end in a complete recalibration of the way we order society, create and distribute wealth, but I don’t think that is going to happen by osmosis. Something big will have to happen as there are too many powerful people with vested interests for it to happen any other way; but once enough people start to feel poorer every year, whilst a few others continue to prosper, something will likely have to give.

The current trajectory of society is completely unjustifiable.
 
blue b4 the moon said:
Hmmm uninspiring again.

Spend a load of money the country hasn't got to kick stuff down the road for years and years.

Fuck all really for the north. How about sorting out the Trans Pennine line and as for airports out some money into small local ones like reopening Blackpool etc

But, what they really need to do is sort out national infrastructure, trains, potholes etc. we may see some growth if people can actually travel around the UK in a reasonable time.

Less said about the apparently indirect helping hand for the rags.... there's a lot of people with noses in troughs again.
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Most Northern towns and Cities have got nothing about them, just dull, run down places that have lacked any inspiration for years.
 
gordondaviesmoustache said:
I think the growth thing is more fundamental than current government policy, and tbf I felt the same when the Tories were in power. I think in the ‘developed world’, and especially Western Europe, economic growth is going to become increasingly hard to achieve, and I think we need to face up to that reality, hard as it will be. It’s simply a symptom of the decline of western hegemony, an ever ageing population and the next phase of capitalism.

I think most likely it will eventually end in a complete recalibration of the way we order society, create and distribute wealth, but I don’t think that is going to happen by osmosis. Something big will have to happen as there are too many powerful people with vested interests for it to happen any other way; but once enough people start to feel poorer every year, whilst a few others continue to prosper, something will likely have to give.

The current trajectory of society is completely unjustifiable.
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This is pretty much my political view in one post I'm just not sure what big thing will make pretty subservient populations here and in Europe take some form of action. If they look to the wrong people for answers it could get very bad indeed.
 
hilts said:
This is pretty much my political view in one post I'm just not sure what big thing will make pretty subservient populations here and in Europe take some form of action. If they look to the wrong people for answers it could get very bad indeed.
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My guess is when the middle classes start to severely feel the effects of this process (which they are to some extent already) and they can see the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos becoming increasingly wealthy, something will have to give. I’m not saying that reflects well on the middle classes but revolutions have always required the broad support of the bourgeoisie to take hold. There are lots of well established reasons for this.

What capitalism became very adept at in Western Europe and the US from the ‘80s onwards was creating a broad middle class which comprised the majority of the population whose living standards rose over sustained periods.

The arithmetic of this meant the ultra wealthy could continue to acquire extreme wealth pretty much unfettered.

The fact that the people at the bottom were left behind did not ‘matter’ in that equation.

Once that equilibrium changes, the dynamics surely will too. If enough people (and the majority) feel poorer year on year, while others become even richer then whatever unspoken consensus previously existed has surely gone.

It could conceivably end in severe oppression from the super wealthy of course - that absolutely cannot be ruled out. But it could also end very differently.

Who the fuck needs £200 billion ffs? It’s an absurd state of affairs.
 
gordondaviesmoustache said:
My guess is when the middle classes start to severely feel the effects of this process (which they are to some extent already) and they can see the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos becoming increasingly wealthy, something will have to give. I’m not saying that reflects well on the middle classes but revolutions have always required the broad support of the bourgeoisie to take hold. There are lots of well established reasons for this.

What capitalism became very adept at in Western Europe and the US from the ‘80s onwards was creating a broad middle class which comprised the majority of the population whose living standards rose over sustained periods.

The arithmetic of this meant the ultra wealthy could continue to acquire extreme wealth pretty much unfettered.

The fact that the people at the bottom were left behind did not ‘matter’ in that equation.

Once that equilibrium changes, the dynamics surely will too. If enough people (and the majority) feel poorer year on year, while others become even richer then whatever unspoken consensus previously existed has surely gone.

It could conceivably end in severe oppression from the super wealthy of course - that absolutely cannot be ruled out. But it could also end very differently.

Who the fuck needs £200 billion ffs? It’s an absurd state of affairs.
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The numbers are so high its actually hard to contemplate how big of a number it is in real terms.
 
gordondaviesmoustache said:
My guess is when the middle classes start to severely feel the effects of this process (which they are to some extent already) and they can see the likes of Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos becoming increasingly wealthy, something will have to give. I’m not saying that reflects well on the middle classes but revolutions have always required the broad support of the bourgeoisie to take hold. There are lots of well established reasons for this.

What capitalism became very adept at in Western Europe and the US from the ‘80s onwards was creating a broad middle class which comprised the majority of the population whose living standards rose over sustained periods.

The arithmetic of this meant the ultra wealthy could continue to acquire extreme wealth pretty much unfettered.

The fact that the people at the bottom were left behind did not ‘matter’ in that equation.

Once that equilibrium changes, the dynamics surely will too. If enough people (and the majority) feel poorer year on year, while others become even richer then whatever unspoken consensus previously existed has surely gone.

It could conceivably end in severe oppression from the super wealthy of course - that absolutely cannot be ruled out. But it could also end very differently.

Who the fuck needs £200 billion ffs? It’s an absurd state of affairs.
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The pandemic showed the extremely wealthy the art of the possible, through that age old weapon of fear. That 2 years saw the richest. 1% capture $26 Trillion of ‘new wealth’. The rest of them world got $16 trillion. That’s 63% of all new money to the already richest people on the planet.
And yet, normally sensible people still think ‘trickle down economics’ is a real thing!

The biggest obstacle though is a compliant media and, given where most people gather their news, the super wealthy controlling all those media outlets, might not be overcome.

What you say about the middle classes being affected will be the thorniest issue they might have to tackle.
They struggled with it in the 60’s protest movements when children of the middle classes started being jailed (it wasn’t just sweaty oils being arrested, who they obviously weren’t bothered about).

Maybe Trumps voters getting absolutely stitched up will be a catalyst but I somehow doubt it..
 
hilts said:
The numbers are so high it’s actually hard to contemplate how big of a number it is in real terms.
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I read the other day that if you had saved £10,000 a day for the last 70,000 years (with no interest) you would have less money than Elon Musk.

I’ve since worked it out on my calculator and it’s correct based on £280 billion :-(
 
gordondaviesmoustache said:
I think the growth thing is more fundamental than current government policy, and tbf I felt the same when the Tories were in power. I think in the ‘developed world’, and especially Western Europe, economic growth is going to become increasingly hard to achieve, and I think we need to face up to that reality, hard as it will be. It’s simply a symptom of the decline of western hegemony, an ever ageing population and the next phase of capitalism.

I think most likely it will eventually end in a complete recalibration of the way we order society, create and distribute wealth, but I don’t think that is going to happen by osmosis. Something big will have to happen as there are too many powerful people with vested interests for it to happen any other way; but once enough people start to feel poorer every year, whilst a few others continue to prosper, something will likely have to give.

The current trajectory of society is completely unjustifiable.
Click to expand...
That is a really mature and thoughtful post, one I identify with.

We live in a world of finite resources, there will come a time where economic growth is simply impossible to achieve, I despise that prick Musk but he knows as a species we need to use space to further exploit our universes resources.

Degrowth is a radical economic theory born in the 1970s. It broadly means shrinking rather than growing economies, to use less of the world's dwindling resources. Detractors of Degrowth say economic growth has given the world everything from cancer treatments to indoor plumbing BUT economic growth will come at the expense of the environment, is that sustainable or even affordable?

We do live in an era of epic income inequality, most big company CEO's will have earned more by the middle of January than there employees will in the whole year, how is that right? It is the workers as Marx correctly identified that create the wealth for the owners of capital, but they do not get the rewards due,

Capitalism though is in the hegemony, it owns the media and uses it to make sure people vote against their own interests and in the interests of the owners of capital.

The only way to change the world is smash capitalism, the worst political system of government we have ever seen, it has encouraged imperialism, militarism and armanism. It has killed millions of people in wars to acquire the resources it needs to flourish and sells its products to kill more people in order to expand its influence. It is a truly monstrous system that betrays humanity. The capitalist governments do not care about those with least, the unfortunate or those who have come across hard times, they seek to profit from human misery and that is truly despicable.

In the UK that inequality is palpable, a Health Economist who i have worked with told me about some work he was doing and he said, if you leave London Kings Cross station to travel to Newcastle, every time the train stops, life expectancy diminishes. How fucking mental is that. How is it in Manchester , there are new builds everywhere going up at an amazing rate but there are beggars on the street living in cardboard boxes. It makes no sense to me as capitalist societies need units of production (workers) yet they are happy to exclude large numbers of people from being a unit of production. I suppose why would a millionaire give a fuck about a person in a cardboard box.

Obviously I think Capitalism is an inherently flawed system, it does not promote equality, it does not promote humanity, it does not make sure those with least are well placed to live well. Its a system that promotes avarice, it exploits and it harms people. It does not make make countries better, it exploits those countries resources and its people for financial gain for the owners of capital.

We don't need more capitalism, we need less, we don't need the Neo-liberal cranks and libertarians running our countries, we need people who care and will fight social injustice, who will tackle inequality and make sure every human being has a proper chance to live a decent and fulfilling life.
 
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