blueish swede
Well-Known Member
I've always wondered who Lincoln was talking about when he said "some of the people". Another mystery solved.
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The Post General Election Thread
- Thread starter Ducado
- Start date
Rascal
El Presidente
This is why i avoided the thread. Anyone thinking the cuts are a good thing is branded a nutter. No reasoned debate.
Why do you think cuts are neccessary?
I asked you fair questions which you have not answered and you did say you have studied the cuts
I also have not called you a nutter personally for a while.. RWNJ is a term of endearment meant in general for all you nutters :)
Why do you think cuts are neccessary?
Because currently the government are spending far more than they are bringing in. I understand the concept of spending our way out of it (better services leads to higher productivity leads to higher wages leads to paying for those better services and the borrowed money), but I don't think it's at all realistic.
France are an example of a country that tried to do that and, as someone else posted today, they are tanking. Around a quarter of youths unemployed was it?
Rather than say I get all of my opinions out of the Daily Mail, I'd like you (or anyone) to tell me why that French model is better.
Rascal
El Presidente
Because currently the government are spending far more than they are bringing in. I understand the concept of spending our way out of it (better services leads to higher productivity leads to higher wages leads to paying for those better services and the borrowed money), but I don't think it's at all realistic.
France are an example of a country that tried to do that and, as someone else posted today, they are tanking. Around a quarter of youths unemployed was it?
Rather than say I get all of my opinions out of the Daily Mail, I'd like you (or anyone) to tell me why that French model is better.
So you believe Keynes to be wrong? From WW2 onwards under the post war consensus we had growth like the country had never seen. We had nationalised industry and no Tory disagreed it was wrong. We invested to grow. We had to as after WW2 we had a deficit of -256% of GDP yet managed to build 2 million homes and create the NHS. The current deficit is smaller than 7 other of the top 10 nations yet Osborne is obsessed by it. He is obsessed by it for political not economic ends.
France are not an example of anything just as Greece is not. It is interesting when people mention France they never use the fact that French productivity is 20% higher than the UKs though. It is simply not possible in my opinion to compare the UK with any other nation.
Can we possibly say that French productivity being higher precludes job growth whilst falling unemployment in the UK can be explained by the growth in zero hour contracts? The French being a strongly unionised country would not allow what we allow for instance. I cant say that is the case nor can you i believe but it has to be an issue surely that far clever people than us will look at.
kas_tippler
Well-Known Member
I've always wondered who Lincoln was talking about when he said "some of the people". Another mystery solved.
John Lydgate
So you believe Keynes to be wrong? From WW2 onwards under the post war consensus we had growth like the country had never seen. We had nationalised industry and no Tory disagreed it was wrong. We invested to grow. We had to as after WW2 we had a deficit of -256% of GDP yet managed to build 2 million homes and create the NHS. The current deficit is smaller than 7 other of the top 10 nations yet Osborne is obsessed by it. He is obsessed by it for political not economic ends.
France are not an example of anything just as Greece is not. It is interesting when people mention France they never use the fact that French productivity is 20% higher than the UKs though. It is simply not possible in my opinion to compare the UK with any other nation.
Can we possibly say that French productivity being higher precludes job growth whilst falling unemployment in the UK can be explained by the growth in zero hour contracts? The French being a strongly unionised country would not allow what we allow for instance. I cant say that is the case nor can you i believe but it has to be an issue surely that far clever people than us will look at.
Do you think that all of the money currently spent on public services is driving growth then? I certainly don't. I'd like to see the nationalisation of public services and government money spent on growth driving facilities but I think there's currently an awful lot of chafe on that wheat.
Productivity is measured as the revenue over the workforce. France's unemployment is far higher than the UK's so their denominator is relatively smaller which can drive a higher score.
I don't believe that's a precursor to job growth either, since their unemployment figures are rising. It's simply a case of the workforce being strained to breaking point. Kind of like covering maternity leave, everyone pitches in so outputs don't drop but it isn't sustainable.
Zero hour contracts account for 2% of the UK jobs created and France has created fewer jobs than Yorkshire. They are a drop in the ocean and don't go any significant way to explaining the unemployment gap between the two countries.
Rascal
El Presidente
Do you think that all of the money currently spent on public services is driving growth then? I certainly don't. I'd like to see the nationalisation of public services and government money spent on growth driving facilities but I think there's currently an awful lot of chafe on that wheat.
.
Excuse me if i ignore the other bits of your excellent post but this bit resonates.
The money spent on public sevices does not explicitly drive growth, it enables growth. Neo Liberals believe that public sector spending inhibits growth. That is Osborne and his position. Him and his acolytes believe that laissez faire free marketism is the answer to all our ills. He is wrong in my opinion. Even Hayek the doyen of Neo Liberalism realised that for there to be a free a market there has to be a strong central state. The state itself provides the opportunity for the market to flourish. Osborne thinks we do not need a strong central state and that is the overwhelming point of his cuts. He sees the role of Government as minimal as it interferes with the individual rights of people to express themselves and also plays well with the gallery of free market believers who want chunks of the UK state for personal profit. I believe that argument to be flawed basically because on a human level we act and work better as a collective.
The fact is that without the Public Sector no growth could be achieved. The Public Sector provides the infrastructure and the workers needed for growth due to our Socialised Education and Transport systems. The Public sector also provides for the well being of the workers that help drive growth. A business can not grow with out workers.
The Public sector also defends those who enable growth through the police and our defence forces.
Your last point about Nationalisation of industry interests me most. You Gov did a poll and 7 out of 10 Tory supporters wanted Energy, the Railways and Royal Mail brought back into public ownership. Not Labour supporters but Tories ffs. Yet we do not have a party that dare propose such things because as soon as Ed Miliband suggested an energy price freeze the media went beserk and called him a Marxist..
Our country increasingly serves the ideals of the rich ( no doubt i will get slagged for that) but it does. How can it be that in the boss of Barcalys bank pay which was 140% above the average Barclays bank worker now be a staggering 4500% higher
Ducado
Well-Known Member
One of the best posts in this threadExcuse me if i ignore the other bits of your excellent post but this bit resonates.
The money spent on public sevices does not explicitly drive growth, it enables growth. Neo Liberals believe that public sector spending inhibits growth. That is Osborne and his position. Him and his acolytes believe that laissez faire free marketism is the answer to all our ills. He is wrong in my opinion. Even Hayek the doyen of Neo Liberalism realised that for there to be a free a market there has to be a strong central state. The state itself provides the opportunity for the market to flourish. Osborne thinks we do not need a strong central state and that is the overwhelming point of his cuts. He sees the role of Government as minimal as it interferes with the individual rights of people to express themselves and also plays well with the gallery of free market believers who want chunks of the UK state for personal profit. I believe that argument to be flawed basically because on a human level we act and work better as a collective.
The fact is that without the Public Sector no growth could be achieved. The Public Sector provides the infrastructure and the workers needed for growth due to our Socialised Education and Transport systems. The Public sector also provides for the well being of the workers that help drive growth. A business can not grow with out workers.
The Public sector also defends those who enable growth through the police and our defence forces.
Your last point about Nationalisation of industry interests me most. You Gov did a poll and 7 out of 10 Tory supporters wanted Energy, the Railways and Royal Mail brought back into public ownership. Not Labour supporters but Tories ffs. Yet we do not have a party that dare propose such things because as soon as Ed Miliband suggested an energy price freeze the media went beserk and called him a Marxist..
Our country increasingly serves the ideals of the rich ( no doubt i will get slagged for that) but it does. How can it be that in the boss of Barcalys bank pay which was 140% above the average Barclays bank worker now be a staggering 4500% higher
Lucky13
Well-Known Member
Good article , worth a read.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/pol...oters-got-it-wrong-it-has-learnt-nothing.html
If Labour thinks voters got it wrong, it has learnt nothing
The party’s next leader must face up to why it was so clearly rejected at the general election, or the whole country could yet be dragged Leftwards
By Janet Daley12:20AM BST 07 Jun 2015329 Comments
Labour is planning to conduct two (why two?) inquiries into its defeat, one of which is described as a truth and reconciliation commission, which gives you some idea of the scale of the calamity we are talking about here. When the loss of an election is likened, without irony, to the end of apartheid, we are in the realm of tragedy rather than mishap. Perhaps I can save those commissioners some time. I am not being sarcastic – well, not entirely sarcastic. I have some sympathy for this apocalyptic view of events, and particularly for the fate of what looked for the longest time like a party that had come to terms with life as it is actually lived but which was dragged back into the mystification and purblind animus that had once all but destroyed it.
It is important for Labour to understand how this happened and for the rest of us to understand what the consequences for all party politics will be if the situation cannot be rectified. Because what happened to Labour is not just confined to Labour: the party’s bizarre return to a hard-Left conceptual framework – with all the fear and loathing that attaches to that view of the world – will infect the discourse not just of the electoral process but of social relations generally.
Ed Miliband with the infamous EdStone (Photo: PA)
The distorted perspective and ugly language that had once appeared to be consigned, as Trotsky did not say, to the dustbin of history has again become commonplace in public debate. However risible or garbled it may now seem – even to those who haven’t heard it all before – it is still dangerous if only by virtue of its recklessness and irresponsibility.
If everybody is not very careful, and very vigilant, the Left will not only force Labour into a wasteland of absurdity and irrelevance – it will take the rest of the political show with it. If you think this is far-fetched, that there is no reason why sane people cannot continue to talk sensibly while Labour gibbers away to itself in the corner, then you underestimate the tireless inventiveness of political activism.
You may appreciate the ingenious devices and disguises that relentless Left-wing campaigning can assume if you have ever seen a local protest (over housing provision, or a hospital closure, or a school becoming an academy) suddenly being transformed before your innocent eyes into a vehicle for condemning “Tory scum” or “the profit motive” or, in more esoteric terms, “neo-liberal economics”. (“Neo-liberalism” is the new demonic enemy: it has replaced “capitalism” as the official term of anathema. I shall return to this point.)
Any local discontent, even an apolitical disagreement or conflict, can be subsumed under the cosmic banner of class war, or the wickedness of some huge, global conspiracy against “the people”. Before you know it, your particular community grievance with its individual circumstances can be swept up into a much greater abstract conflagration with vast historical antecedents and an ideological explanation. Your anger about whatever the local difficulty is will be whipped into militant shape by practised agitators with a ready-and-waiting vocabulary of social unrest. Yes, dear reader, you may recognise this pattern already. If you don’t, you had better be ready for it because Left-wing activism is aroused and very, very angry – and it will be looking for every possible outlet for vengeance.
Now let’s return to that word, neo-liberalism, which refers to the doctrine of liberal, or free-market, economics. It is used pejoratively by the Left to refer to the rebirth of belief in free-market solutions after a period in which socialist or collectivist economies had seemed to be the wave of the future. The opposite of a “liberal economy” must be, of course, an illiberal one: a system in which freedoms are restricted or abolished and various economic levers are controlled by the state.
That has been at the heart of the political argument in the West for more than a century, but it has been given – or should have been given – a dramatic turn by the collapse of the great collectivist economies of Eastern Europe. But the fact of that collapse has not had anything like the impact on this debate it should have had, largely because of the blindly desperate antics of Left-wing activism that has simply refused to come to terms with it. We should all be – to a greater or lesser extent – advocates of liberal economics now, and for a while, when Labour threw off its hard-Left influences, we were.
Not only did Labour win elections but the whole country was able to engage in some quite rational discussions about the role of government and the most effective ways to deliver public services. Well that, at least for the moment, is over. Instead, we have to go back to hurling ridiculous insults at each other and arguing about whether it is “evil” to advocate a social insurance system for healthcare or reducing the power of local education authorities.
Even what are known as “moderate” candidates for the Labour leadership have to mind what they say about the value of wealth creation and steer clear of embracing those infamous “liberal” economic solutions, while the party wallows in the most absurd explanations for its own unpopularity. The most idiotic of these – that the campaign wasn’t Left-wing enough – reminds me of the apologists who insisted after the 1983 Labour defeat that the electorate had failed to “understand our message”. It took another decade for the realisation to dawn that voters had – boy, had they ever – understood it. This was not incomprehension: it was repudiation.
I do know how deeply frustrating this is to committed activists. When my husband and I were fresh-faced young Trotskyists, we would go to visit his working-class parents in the North bringing with us the great message. Mystifyingly, my father-in-law was not receptive to our gospel of the “organised working class”. He described his shop steward as “a little Hitler” who was not only determined to disrupt the working life of the factory but who constantly badgered the men to slow their rate of production in order to increase the overtime.
The thing that angered my in-laws was not the conditions at work but what they called “the stoppages” on their pay packets each week: the amount that was taken from their wages in tax and national insurance. That was in the Sixties, before Thatcherism was ever dreamt of. But almost 20 years later when it came along, there were plenty of working-class people who were more than ready to hear what it had to say to them. Labour knew this once. Now it can only accuse the benighted electorate of letting themselves down when they turn away from the socialist call. As the painfully young Ed Miliband fan Richard Briggs said on the BBC’s Daily Politics last week: “Ed Miliband is too good for this f------ country.”
That (as Mr Biggs might put it) is basically it: the nation is not worthy. Just wait for the Left to take its revenge. It will do this by invading and subverting (in the true, technical sense of the word) every public issue that it can. Sometimes this will be through front groups – anything called the Coalition against this, or the Alliance for that, is almost certainly an assemblage of hard-Left groups banding together in what Marxists used to call a “popular front” – and sometimes through the indefatigable determination of a tiny handful of individuals.
Assuming that the Labour Party does not elect Jeremy Corbyn as its leader, the hardcore Left will move out of the formal democratic process. But it will continue to exert extraordinarily disproportionate influence on the national discussion because so many people who should know better will not stand up to its accusations. That is the real risk to the life of the country.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/pol...oters-got-it-wrong-it-has-learnt-nothing.html
If Labour thinks voters got it wrong, it has learnt nothing
The party’s next leader must face up to why it was so clearly rejected at the general election, or the whole country could yet be dragged Leftwards
By Janet Daley12:20AM BST 07 Jun 2015329 Comments
Labour is planning to conduct two (why two?) inquiries into its defeat, one of which is described as a truth and reconciliation commission, which gives you some idea of the scale of the calamity we are talking about here. When the loss of an election is likened, without irony, to the end of apartheid, we are in the realm of tragedy rather than mishap. Perhaps I can save those commissioners some time. I am not being sarcastic – well, not entirely sarcastic. I have some sympathy for this apocalyptic view of events, and particularly for the fate of what looked for the longest time like a party that had come to terms with life as it is actually lived but which was dragged back into the mystification and purblind animus that had once all but destroyed it.
It is important for Labour to understand how this happened and for the rest of us to understand what the consequences for all party politics will be if the situation cannot be rectified. Because what happened to Labour is not just confined to Labour: the party’s bizarre return to a hard-Left conceptual framework – with all the fear and loathing that attaches to that view of the world – will infect the discourse not just of the electoral process but of social relations generally.
Ed Miliband with the infamous EdStone (Photo: PA)
The distorted perspective and ugly language that had once appeared to be consigned, as Trotsky did not say, to the dustbin of history has again become commonplace in public debate. However risible or garbled it may now seem – even to those who haven’t heard it all before – it is still dangerous if only by virtue of its recklessness and irresponsibility.
If everybody is not very careful, and very vigilant, the Left will not only force Labour into a wasteland of absurdity and irrelevance – it will take the rest of the political show with it. If you think this is far-fetched, that there is no reason why sane people cannot continue to talk sensibly while Labour gibbers away to itself in the corner, then you underestimate the tireless inventiveness of political activism.
You may appreciate the ingenious devices and disguises that relentless Left-wing campaigning can assume if you have ever seen a local protest (over housing provision, or a hospital closure, or a school becoming an academy) suddenly being transformed before your innocent eyes into a vehicle for condemning “Tory scum” or “the profit motive” or, in more esoteric terms, “neo-liberal economics”. (“Neo-liberalism” is the new demonic enemy: it has replaced “capitalism” as the official term of anathema. I shall return to this point.)
Any local discontent, even an apolitical disagreement or conflict, can be subsumed under the cosmic banner of class war, or the wickedness of some huge, global conspiracy against “the people”. Before you know it, your particular community grievance with its individual circumstances can be swept up into a much greater abstract conflagration with vast historical antecedents and an ideological explanation. Your anger about whatever the local difficulty is will be whipped into militant shape by practised agitators with a ready-and-waiting vocabulary of social unrest. Yes, dear reader, you may recognise this pattern already. If you don’t, you had better be ready for it because Left-wing activism is aroused and very, very angry – and it will be looking for every possible outlet for vengeance.
Now let’s return to that word, neo-liberalism, which refers to the doctrine of liberal, or free-market, economics. It is used pejoratively by the Left to refer to the rebirth of belief in free-market solutions after a period in which socialist or collectivist economies had seemed to be the wave of the future. The opposite of a “liberal economy” must be, of course, an illiberal one: a system in which freedoms are restricted or abolished and various economic levers are controlled by the state.
That has been at the heart of the political argument in the West for more than a century, but it has been given – or should have been given – a dramatic turn by the collapse of the great collectivist economies of Eastern Europe. But the fact of that collapse has not had anything like the impact on this debate it should have had, largely because of the blindly desperate antics of Left-wing activism that has simply refused to come to terms with it. We should all be – to a greater or lesser extent – advocates of liberal economics now, and for a while, when Labour threw off its hard-Left influences, we were.
Not only did Labour win elections but the whole country was able to engage in some quite rational discussions about the role of government and the most effective ways to deliver public services. Well that, at least for the moment, is over. Instead, we have to go back to hurling ridiculous insults at each other and arguing about whether it is “evil” to advocate a social insurance system for healthcare or reducing the power of local education authorities.
Even what are known as “moderate” candidates for the Labour leadership have to mind what they say about the value of wealth creation and steer clear of embracing those infamous “liberal” economic solutions, while the party wallows in the most absurd explanations for its own unpopularity. The most idiotic of these – that the campaign wasn’t Left-wing enough – reminds me of the apologists who insisted after the 1983 Labour defeat that the electorate had failed to “understand our message”. It took another decade for the realisation to dawn that voters had – boy, had they ever – understood it. This was not incomprehension: it was repudiation.
I do know how deeply frustrating this is to committed activists. When my husband and I were fresh-faced young Trotskyists, we would go to visit his working-class parents in the North bringing with us the great message. Mystifyingly, my father-in-law was not receptive to our gospel of the “organised working class”. He described his shop steward as “a little Hitler” who was not only determined to disrupt the working life of the factory but who constantly badgered the men to slow their rate of production in order to increase the overtime.
The thing that angered my in-laws was not the conditions at work but what they called “the stoppages” on their pay packets each week: the amount that was taken from their wages in tax and national insurance. That was in the Sixties, before Thatcherism was ever dreamt of. But almost 20 years later when it came along, there were plenty of working-class people who were more than ready to hear what it had to say to them. Labour knew this once. Now it can only accuse the benighted electorate of letting themselves down when they turn away from the socialist call. As the painfully young Ed Miliband fan Richard Briggs said on the BBC’s Daily Politics last week: “Ed Miliband is too good for this f------ country.”
That (as Mr Biggs might put it) is basically it: the nation is not worthy. Just wait for the Left to take its revenge. It will do this by invading and subverting (in the true, technical sense of the word) every public issue that it can. Sometimes this will be through front groups – anything called the Coalition against this, or the Alliance for that, is almost certainly an assemblage of hard-Left groups banding together in what Marxists used to call a “popular front” – and sometimes through the indefatigable determination of a tiny handful of individuals.
Assuming that the Labour Party does not elect Jeremy Corbyn as its leader, the hardcore Left will move out of the formal democratic process. But it will continue to exert extraordinarily disproportionate influence on the national discussion because so many people who should know better will not stand up to its accusations. That is the real risk to the life of the country.
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Prestwich_Blue
Well-Known Member
Anyone who thinks the cuts are a good thing IS a nutter because no sane, rational person who understands economics does think that. The people who think they are a good thing don't understand economics and are spoon fed this view by the ideologues in the Tory party via their lapdogs in the right wing media.This is why i avoided the thread. Anyone thinking the cuts are a good thing is branded a nutter. No reasoned debate.
In times of recession, when tax receipts and output are declining, it makes sense to borrow more, increasing the deficit temporarily, to offset this. By investing in infrastructure and services, this reverses the decline and encourages growth. As GDP grows, ultimately the deficit will or should be eliminated. It might take longer than it would take by harsh cuts but avoids the problems we had in the early years of the Coalition, where they did have to increase borrowing to correct the negative impact of their cuts.
And the £12bn cuts are coming out of the £120bn non-pension part of the welfare budget. So that's 10% not 1%. If you haven't even read enough to understand that then you really shouldn't be commenting.