I,i,i,i,fwah, Fwah, Fwah It’s The Tories

Discussion in 'Politics 2.0' started by Moose, Sep 29, 2021.

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Who do you want as the next Tory party Leader

  1. Rishi Sunak

    7 vote(s)
    63.6%
  2. Lizz Truss

    4 vote(s)
    36.4%
  1. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    Johnson argues for ‘thrift’. I mean comedy gold.

    Just look around the Downing Street flat.

    That’s thrift for plebs.
     
  2. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    It’s an absolute marvel that the Tories, after 11 years in power, can give themselves a round of applause for saying we will get social care done.

    Hats ******* off chaps. Labour are amateurs.

    He’s just promised all this will end up in a low tax economy!!
     
  3. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    Silly lies now about Labour not liking competitive sports. From someone who has won everything from the enormous headstart he received in life.

    Or about Labour letting hardened criminals off when there was a discussion about decriminalising low level possession.
     
  4. HenryHooter

    HenryHooter Reservist

    Further to this, big business, who, I don't think anyone will disagree, are the ones benefitting from cheap Labour, were on the side of the lefties and remainers who wished to stay in the EU.

    It is, in my opinion, most unseemly of the left to now make an argument that the tories are in cahoots with big business, when the cabal of lefties, remainers and corporate interests, were desperate to maintain the status quo with regard to the use of cheap labour, and the access of exploitable low paid workers via free movement. All of which, in the corporate interest, would have the effect of keeping wages and conditions down.

    Don't blame the government for removing the number one block to companies having to reconsider dismal wage policies, enabled entirely by the EU. And when you complain that historically wages have been kept down in the UK, remember that it occurred during the tenure of our membership, and that, having left, we are now seeing wage improvements.

    We have even had left leaning posters on here complaining that paying the workers more will raise prices. Of cousre it will, because the corporate allies of the left are not going to allow their profits to be affected.

    I think it is ridiculous that "lefties" blame the government for achieving wage improvements, whilst also blaming them for the wages that businesses pay (as if they are set by Boris himself), and calling for, along with corporate allies, a return to the regulations that kept wages down in the first place.

    The madness of it, and lack of a pause to see what they are doing*, seems stupendous!

    * of course, they do know what they are doing, but it is more important to blame the government than it is for wages to improve. It is just useful that more casual observers will perceive them as lacking in intelligence, rather than integrity.
     
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  5. Heidar

    Heidar Squad Player

    If they're going to give Boris a standing ovation, why not have a fireworks display.

    Indoors.

    Problem solved.
     
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  6. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    So much to like about Johnson’s speech. Sorting out social care, the environment, introducing formerly native wildlife, levelling the nation up, transport fixed, housing ownership for all, excellent public services and wage rises all IN YOUR FACE LABOUR!

    And this will result in lower taxes on wealth creators.

    He may as well say every heterosexual woman to meet a man like George Clooney and every man’s wife to have bigger knockers. It’s on that level.

    And yet winning stuff.
     
  7. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    Hereward the Woke falling flat even in the hall. Back on silly culture wars now, babbling about Churchill, the NHS, footballers, Emma Raducanu etc…
     
  8. Heidar

    Heidar Squad Player

    And Dominic Raab, the absolute disgrace of my school alumni, doesn't even know what the word "Misogyny" means. ****.
     
  9. I had the misfortune, being on a motorcycle listening thru headphones on the motorway, of being unable to turn the **** off.
    Vacuous babble, chuck in a few cultural references.

    Johnson: blah blah Bon John Govi
    Audience, cor, inee wivvit!
    J: blah blah Tartarian hole
    A: cor, inee clevah! (Mumbling "wots 'at mean?"
    J: blah blah Gray's Elegy
    A: cor, he really knows 'is stuff! (Mumbling "wot's that?")

    He's an empty shell. I don't think I'll ever be truly happy until he's in jail or dead.
     
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  10. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    It was both brilliant and ridiculous. Feelgood sounds for zombies.

    But it was an interesting vision he had of Britain from the air, it’s patchwork of little houses, all beautified by their owners, our trust in private property making us so attractive to investment from overseas. The South full and ripe for foreign investment, the North the place with space where poorer people must go to live. He forgot to mention the beautiful country estates in his vision are owned by Russian Tory donors.

    He loves the Country as it is and will do everything he can to ensure that it is still the Country of Gray, Churchill and Thatcher, led as ever from the playing fields of Eton. That’s the job in a nutshell.

    A place for everyone and everyone in their place.
     
  11. HenryHooter

    HenryHooter Reservist

    So to summarise Boris's speach, it was pure, head in the clouds Labour that he'll never be able to pay for. Pretty much the reaction Labour got to their manifesto in 2019.

    At least there is some recognition of my claim, of over a year now, that what lefties were promising to be "the furthest extreme right wing government ever", is actually the most left wing bunch of tories that ever existed.

    I always enjoy it when the forum finally catches up with Hooter and his crazy "bating" of lefties.
     
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  12. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    Boris’s love of promising everything to everyone doesn’t make him left any more than his protestations of love made him faithful while he was married.

    Fact is this is going to be an exceptionally hard winter for up maybe 10m Brits with low wages, universal credit or both. Prices and fuel are rocketing and the Government’s response? Take £20 off UC.

    They better enjoy his words, because he is doing eff all for them.
     
  13. HenryHooter

    HenryHooter Reservist

    The government are closing down a covid support policy. You know, and I know, that if people have trouble over the winter, the government will act to support them.

    Remember the shock even of the Labour party when the tories announced their monumentally generous and socialist furlough scheme? I fancy similar will happen over the winter, only designed to support the areas that need it. just as the uplift was intended to support a particular situation.

    But make hay whilst the sun is shining, by all means, becsuse you may find less chance to do so when specific policies for specific situations are implimented.
     
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  14. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    Thanks for clarifying that there is nothing so far.

    Other than the minus £20. I’ll assume you support that as you’ve said nothing to the contrary.
     
  15. reids

    reids First Team

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  16. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

  17. HenryHooter

    HenryHooter Reservist

    Any time. Like I say, you know, I know and the Labour party know, the government will act to support people with specific policies. But it is just too tempting, over conference season, for people to say 'why are you taking this away', when the appropriate question should be, 'are you going to do something?' They can't possibly know what will be needed yet (it would be inappropriate to make plans based on scare mongering), but they do know that the uplift, which does not target all in need of fuel support whilst paying out to many who need it least, has reached its useful end.
     
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  18. HenryHooter

    HenryHooter Reservist

    Yes. I would like to see the end of MPs in the house who are this far out of touch with reality.

    Suffice to say though, if his demands were met, it would probably be supported almost unanimously by all sides of the house.

    MPs pay rises should reflect those of all public employees. That, in the public sector, would have an even greater effect on wage improvements than Brexit has on the private sector.
     
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  19. sydney_horn

    sydney_horn Squad Player

  20. Great article. Presume paywalled?

    t times like this you have to feel some sympathy for cabinet ministers. What do they do when they hear the prime minister spouting nonsense? Do they, like Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, just go along with it? Do they, like other unnamed cabinet ministers, turbocharge it, accusing businesses of having become “drunk on cheap labour”?

    Boris Johnson took to the airwaves at the weekend and, when he wasn’t demonstrating that he did not know much about animal husbandry — you might call it pig ignorance — blamed “uncontrolled” immigration for the fact that the UK was not a high-wage, high-skilled economy.

    As diversionary dog whistles go, this was new territory. The prime minister was at it again yesterday, saying on the BBC that this had been a problem for 25 years, which was odd. That was nearly a decade before the EU admitted eight countries from eastern Europe. Workers from the countries who were members a quarter of a century ago, the EU14, earn more on average than UK citizens in this country.

    I say nonsense, and it was recognised to be so even by economists who strongly supported Brexit. I don’t need to spell it out. A shortage of HGV drivers may result in higher wages for them, and indeed is doing so. But the more such shortages there are, because of a supply shock, the more costs will rise and, particularly following a huge monetary stimulus, the more inflation will become a problem, squeezing the real wages of everybody else. The idea that these shortages were part of a masterplan is laughable.

    We will soon move beyond the distortion in average earnings caused by the furlough scheme. When we do we will find that pay increases have not undergone a post-Brexit revolution. For the majority, earnings will struggle to keep up with the rise in prices.

    The government is straining every sinew to deflect the blame for some of the present problems away from one B-word, Brexit, by blaming another B-word, business.

    The missing ingredient in all this, of course, is a P-word, productivity. Pay rises without an accompanying rise in productivity will push up unit wage costs. Stagnant productivity explains why real wages did so badly in the 2010s. Adjusted for inflation, the average weekly wage was £501 in December 2019, spookily similar to its £500 level in the first quarter of 2010. It has gone up a bit since, on admittedly distorted figures, but remains below the pre-crisis level achieved in early 2008. For comparison, real average earnings and productivity rose strongly in the 2000s, even though there was a financial crisis and deep recession at the end of it.

    Aren’t businesses to blame for the productivity stagnation of the past decade? Should they not have invested more rather than, as ministers suggest, gorging themselves on cheap labour? This is an enduring urban myth.

    EU enlargement and the opening up of the UK labour market to eastern European workers from the new member states occurred in May 2004. Over the following four years UK business investment rose by a healthy 21 per cent in real terms until the financial crisis hit. When the crisis began to lift, business investment again rose strongly, by 43 per cent between early 2010 and the second quarter of 2016. This is what happens. Employment and investment are not alternatives; they go hand in hand.

    Then business investment stagnated. The Brexit vote acted as a bucket of cold water. Businesses were concerned about what lay ahead and, it seems, were right to be worried. Investment was lower in real terms at the end of 2019 than in mid-2016. Had the recovery in business investment persisted, productivity might have shrugged off its torpor. Instead, it faded away.

    As for employment, in the period leading up to the pandemic, the employment rate for working-age UK citizens rose to a record level, up from 73.5 per cent at the start of 2004 to 76.7 per cent at the end of 2019. The evidence on the effect of immigration on wages, as summarised by the Migration Observatory, shows a very small impact at the bottom of the income scale, one that affects other migrant workers disproportionately, but a gain for those on middle and higher incomes.

    There is no “lump of labour” — the mistaken idea that there is only a certain number of jobs to go around — to describe the fallacy exposed by economists more than a century ago. Migrants boost the size of the economy and generate incomes for others.

    The die is cast. Temporary visas on unattractive terms will not attract many EU workers. Free movement of labour, an important ingredient of UK labour market flexibility, is over.

    That means we need, more than ever, to solve the dilemma of stagnant productivity growth. Rishi Sunak, who avoided blowing the dog whistle in his Tory conference speech, though he did burnish his Brexit credentials, touched on this.

    His vision of turning the UK into a kind of California, built on technologies such as artificial intelligence, capable on its own of delivering a £200 billion annual boost to the economy, was attractive. It is right to be ambitious about these things but politicians should also beware of being dazzled by technology. Ever since Harold Wilson’s “white heat of the technological revolution” nearly 60 years ago, they have been prone to it.

    The route to higher wages is higher productivity and that means hundreds of thousands of small changes in businesses across the economy, to raise productivity levels in the long tail of poor performers in every region and every sector to those of the best. It requires co-operation between government and business. That becomes harder when businesses are being loaded with extra taxes, in the form of national insurance and corporation tax, and are being used by ministers as a scapegoat.

    Many firms believe this is an anti-business government. That is not healthy. Neither is a government that tries to perpetuate economic myths.

    David Smith is Economics Editor of The Sunday Times

    tl;dr? - with this fantasy prone government, we're screwed.
     
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  21. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

  22. miked2006

    miked2006 Premiership Prediction League Proprietor

    Good article in the FT making a similar point:

    A wiser course would have been to manage the withdrawal of labour over a period of time, say 18 months. For all the talk of businesses having had plenty of time to adjust to the end of free movement, none could foresee the extra complexity of the pandemic. Instead the government has willed the end without securing the economic foundations and in defiance of exceptional circumstances. It is akin to throwing a baby in a pool and hoping it will swim.

    While the ambition to wean the UK off cheap, low-skilled labour was genuine, the argument has now been retrofitted to the immediate supply crisis in the hope of shifting blame from the government to the corporate sector. The politics has been shrewd but it will carry less weight if the shortages are protracted and the wage gains are wiped out by increases in the cost of living.

    Perhaps most concerning for Tories should be the signs that Johnson, in his glib dismissal of challenges, is beginning to evince a Thatcherite belief in his invulnerability. Doggedness is admirable, but a refusal to heed warnings because they are coming from the wrong people carries costs.

    His closing speech was an ebullient and effective tour de force. But the optimistic vision is outpacing reality. Panic buying is a warning that the public does not trust the government’s ability to manage the seismic changes it seeks to visit on the economy. The fear lurking even among Tory strategists is that voters may conclude he is all destination and no map.
     
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  23. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

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  24. HenryHooter

    HenryHooter Reservist

    Honestly, who is really buying this idea that a flood of cheap labour is the answer to poor wages? Suggested in the Times by a corporate expert. It hasn't been in the decades since freedom of movement was introduced, so why would it be now? And why are the left so alligned with the corporations, rather than the workers?

    At least he makes it clear he is speculating on hear say, quoting things like "many firms believe" rather than an authoritative source. If many firms believe, it is fair then to understand that the majority of firms do not. How can we tell who is right? Should the firms have a fight to decide? It makes his opinion, being based on such things, worth no more than my opinion. He just hopes that those seeking confirmation of their own fears miss the fact that he has no firm base to make his assumption, just the suggestion that those unnamed 'firms' (suspicious by the absence in an article published in such a respected organ) may or may not be right.

    He also fails to explain, where he states that migrant workers create wealth, that the same can be achieved by drawing UK workers by improving wages conditions for workers who have fallen out of the system.

    The claim that productivity is key is typical of corrupt capitalism, and the avowed enemy of the worker. A fair days work for a fair days pay is enethema to these corporates, and he is clearly making the threat 'take away our cheap labour and we will work you like dogs'. That blatant fact cannot be denied. Do the genuine socialists on here believe that is the only option? Even if the modern day leftists seem to think it is worth dying on the hill for.

    The fact is, corrupted capitalism will not draw people back into employment, therefore, the answer is, pay reasonable wages, provide reasonable conditions, mitigate these reasonable actions by sharing out your (in some cases) obscene profits, and act as if we are all in it together. Why on earth would modern day lefties reject that as an ideal? Because exploiting workers is a means to an end, and they have recently found they have lost that support. So sod 'em, bring back the EU, and 'Let's get Marxism Done'.

    The article is yet another example of lefties and corporations in cahoots.
     
    Last edited: Oct 7, 2021
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  25. sydney_horn

    sydney_horn Squad Player

    Very good. I'm still not convinced by the argument that "cheap, low skilled workers" are the problem though.

    We could, and should, have fixed the problem of low pay and poor conditions through legislation and increasing the minimum wage. Indeed we still can.

    The suggestion that we simply replace the migrant workers with a non existent UK workforce just doesn't stack up. And is that really the ambition we want for future UK educated workers anyway?

    Surely we should be looking to get UK workers into skilled jobs and getting migrants to fill the gaps in the unskilled market?

    A reminder of some analysis I posted at the time from the NIESR that explores the the reality of the impact of EU migrants on wage growth compared to the newspaper headlines;

    https://www.niesr.ac.uk/blog/how-small-small-impact-immigration-uk-wages
     
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  26. Bwood_Horn

    Bwood_Horn Squad Player

    From the Geordies:

     
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  27. Bwood_Horn

    Bwood_Horn Squad Player

    The knock-on effect of the £20 UC cut (and benefits in general) has never, ever been discussed. Of course, the vast majority of people on UC (and benefits in general) would be utilising any extra they receiving by investing in off-shore tracker funds (managed in the most tax-efficient manner) and hedging using financial instruments that are proudly "Made in Britain".

    They don't spend ever penny they get locally in local businesses/shops. I wonder what the knock-on effect of this?
     
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  28. HenryHooter

    HenryHooter Reservist

    This is a shocking suggestion.

    Not only does it attempt to justify the exploitation of cheap labour, but it even adds an element of far right nationalism.

    It is literally saying “Why should we have Britons doing unskilled work when we can get Poles, Romanians, etc., to do it for us?

    It would create an underclass deliberately exploiting unskilled foreigners. And what do we do with unskilled UK residents? Just not provide them with any work at all? The intention of the Government is to improve unskilled wages, not keep them down and only pay them to foreigners. Or is it a suggestion that we create a UK super race that wouldn’t dream of doing the lowly work? For who else can the ‘we’ be that is spoken of here?

    I don’t think anyone is seriously or deliberately being a nazi here. I just think it is a very poorly thought out argument, the ramifications of which represent the type of exploitation the left, in the past, would have been horrified by.

    This is not a smear post. It is pointing out the reality of what is being said.
     
    Last edited: Oct 7, 2021
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  29. HenryHooter

    HenryHooter Reservist

    Yeah, but if they want to exploit their own work and reap in the mullah, then selling their souls to the devil is part of the deal.

    Funny how some capitalist can get so disgusted with themselves that they try to distance themselves from their customers, whilst still saying thank you for your purchase.

    There is hypocrisy here.
     
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  30. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    It’s a particularly **** thing to associate your brand or ideas to other people’s art without their permission. It is, pretty much, theft.
     
  31. Bwood_Horn

    Bwood_Horn Squad Player

    This is a highly libellous statement as they were granted British citizenship*...

    *...shortly before making those donations.
     
  32. HenryHooter

    HenryHooter Reservist

    No. They put their art on sale, and they like the money. They are capitalists.

    If it wasn't for sale, Boris couldn't have used it.
     
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  33. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

    Anyway it’s been a marvellous conference. Johnson’s speech signals an end to low wages, a home for all, social care fixed, lower prices, a beautiful rewilded landscape, broadband for all, renewed infrastructure, all the NHS and schools need etc etc.

    And all of this in a low tax economy.

    Which is brilliant. Jeremy Corbyn offered much of this, but the daft old twunt suggested that taxation would be required to pay for it. People will always prefer the model where they get everything they want at no cost.

    What a loser! No wonder he didn’t get in.
     
  34. Moose

    Moose First Team Captain

  35. Keighley

    Keighley First Team

    You know this, do you? Like all of those occasions Trump used music without permission?

    Copyrighted work cannot be used without permission of the copyright holder. It’s irrelevant that it is “on sale”.
     
    Last edited: Oct 8, 2021

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