one out all out: a brexit from the modern world and every one of its problems please (we're all gonna die lol)

MY BREXIT PLAN

We feed the rats to the cats and the cats to the rats and get the cat skins for nothing! Try doing that under EU guidelines!

Baby-naked, heel to bonce
All yellow dots, the flabby nonce
A blobby figure tall and pink,
With sharp blue eyes, half spin half squint,
Bulbous, bald, with rubber skin,
No tuft on cheek nor beard on chin…
But lips where smiles went out and in--
There was no guessing his kith and kin!
And nobody could enough admire
The tall man and his quaint attire.
Quoth one: “It’s as if my great-grandsire,
Starting up at the Trump of Doom’s tone,
Had walked this way from his painted tombstone!”

bcz robert browning hasn't suffered enough

picking up the media's slack brokenshire has declared that the tories need to ask themselves some hard questions

has there been any good writing on unpicking the validity of the UK’s unemployment figures ?

I mean by all accounts the conservatives have delivered a jobs miracle - unemployment is at historic lows if we go with the headline figures but it doesn’t seem to really square with what is going on in the wider economy (eg an economy purring along at full employment would expect to see significant improvement in wages; the retail sector wouldn’t be dying in a ditch etc). my hunch - and I’ve not seen anything unpicking this - is that there are two (related) factors at play: 1 quite a lot of “employed” people are actually struggling self-employed; and 2 a lot of the employed people are very under employed.

im-anecdotal-e as a highly skilled professional (lol) who would quite like to change jobs - were the economy actually in the midst of a jobs miracle I’d have a pick of rewarding roles to move into. this is decidedly not the case. and it has knock on effects eg mutes my household spending

merry wobs

It really angers me when complete arsehole BBC correspondents refer to this "jobs miracle" like it doesn't come with any appalling caveats.

most stuff I've read or heard is from people at the sharp end of UC fuckery.

to further develop my thesis that all social injustices in this country are expressed/come to a head in the dire housing/property sitch: the rise in contract work is a big factor in the housing crisis

I was listening to a homeless labourer guy talking about how he was evicted because of being in between contract work and UC taking too long to process + pay him for his Landlord's liking. Sympathy rating started dropping when he started going on about how wasn't a scrounger and was in fact a decent tax paying citizen etc...

there was a short-lived little settlement built by rough sleepers in manchester a cpl years ago that had a portaloo, a bit of security etc. and i read an interview with the main guy behind it in which he talked abt only wanting industrious rough sleepers to stay, the good sort who wanted to better themselves and so on and I've never felt more dismal abt the state of the nations brutalised psychology

It doest matter where it is, there will always be a hierarchy.

the foundational tenet of conservatism - merry christmas to all!

I am leaving the IEA as of 1 Jan 2019. I will miss it. But I won't miss the endless "who funds you?" tweets. They reveal a profound misunderstanding of the kind of people who work at think tanks and what motivates them. And always irrelevant to the issue at hand. So stupid.

— Jamie Whyte (@_JamieWhyte) December 27, 2018

cue a thousand who funds you? tweets. This disingenuous fucker is trying to say it isn't a very pertinent question because he's a pure ideas and reason man, and who funds the IEA is irrelevant.

lol, good replies.

has there been any good writing on unpicking the validity of the UK’s unemployment figures ?

I mean by all accounts the conservatives have delivered a jobs miracle - unemployment is at historic lows if we go with the headline figures but it doesn’t seem to really square with what is going on in the wider economy (eg an economy purring along at full employment would expect to see significant improvement in wages; the retail sector wouldn’t be dying in a ditch etc). my hunch - and I’ve not seen anything unpicking this - is that there are two (related) factors at play: 1 quite a lot of “employed” people are actually struggling self-employed; and 2 a lot of the employed people are very under employed.

im-anecdotal-e as a highly skilled professional (lol) who would quite like to change jobs - were the economy actually in the midst of a jobs miracle I’d have a pick of rewarding roles to move into. this is decidedly not the case. and it has knock on effects eg mutes my household spending

― there are no good podcasts (||||||||), Monday, 24 December 2018 17:40 (four days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this has been puzzling economists. tho it's worth saying that the latest figures do show a growth in UK wages even if it is still comparatively low. GDP growth is also low, so I think purring is probably an overestimate even on the available figures.

Diane Coyle (who wrote a v useful book on GDP) argues in this podcast that there's something fundamentally broken about the wage growth/gdp figures, in that they don't link properly to well being any more. They're not detailed enough, they don't understand new technology or productivity in the home enough, they hide people who have withdrawn from the labour market or are underemployed.

aiui it's your last point that's one aspect of how gdp and jobs figures don't show important detail. Jobs are not as fluidly transferable as a reading the figures implies. That is either geographically or in terms of skills or demographics. So the first thing to say, and this seems pertinent to the UK, is that the figures are not granular enough and hide differences between London and the rest of England (England specifically).

Here is my preferred measure of regional inequality. GDP dispersion at NUTS2. Top findings,
* UK has higher regional inequality than our neighbours. And increasing.
* EU as a whole has falling regional inequality. Good.
* North England is extremely equal. Our equality is steady. pic.twitter.com/T0pRSZXjAK

— Tom Forth (@thomasforth) November 9, 2018

Problems outside of London can be hidden by strong employment and growth in London.

Granularity is also important in identifying particular sectors:

“Britain’s tightening jobs market is delivering stronger pay rises, particularly for workers in ICT, hospitality, and real estate,” he said. “2019 looks set to be a far better year for pay than this one.”

So that's new technology jobs, the potentially fragile real estate market, and the hospitality industry where we know they're struggling with the number of EU workers falling at the fastest rate since records began (FT paywall again), a trend that I think we can assume will continue. That can mean employment going up, but in low-wage jobs.

In this paper, The Lack of Wage Growth and the Falling NAIRU, Danny Blanchflower has argued your point 2, that underemployment is most important factor. Though the most recent statistics indicate the number of economically inactive people has gone down, and I believe that the number of full-time employed people has gone up, so this doesn't seem to cover everything.

Retail, we know that the rise of online shopping has hit high street shops hard. What's interesting is that online retailer Asos recently issued a profit warning. It's not clear whether that's because of factors specific to Asos, increased competition, or customer spending going down due to personal debt levels and uncertainty about what next year holds. But despite that recent overall wage growth figure, overall consumer spending has not gone up. This is linked to a lot of the critical factors: low wage growth, new technology, more being done in the home. It's interesting to look at how important consumer spending is to the UK:

https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451cbef69e2022ad3b67fb8200b-pi

that's from this post:

Although the profit share hasn’t changed much except for the slump in the early 70s and subsequent recovery, the components of it have done so.

To see this, we need to manipulate the national accounts a little. GDP is equal to the sum of consumer spending (C), investment (I), government spending (G) and net exports (NX). It’s also equal to wages (W), plus profits (P), plus taxes on production (T), plus other incomes such as rent and those of the self-employed (O). Rearranging these gives us four components of profits:

P = (C – W) + (I – O) + (G – T) + NX.

This equation is intuitive if you think of the circular flow of income. Profits are high (other things equal) if consumption is high relative to wages – that is, if workers return their wages to capitalists in the form of consumer spending. They will also be high if capital spending is high relative to other incomes: this is because one firm’s investment is another’s orders. They’ll also be high if government spending is high and taxes low, and if net exports are high – that is, if foreign demand for UK goods and services is strong.

My chart plots these four components as a share of GDP since the ONS’s quarterly data began in 1955: they are simply a rearrangement of the data in tables C1 and D of the quarterly national accounts. If we add the four lines together, we’d get my first chart.

Another option is to trust the figures, and say that overall the economy is doing ok. Very data driven types would say, well why aren't you believing this data? And why are you looking for stuff that disproves it? The questions make me slightly uneasy coming from a left position that says the Tories have basically fucked the country, but living in a relatively affluent area I don't see much of that directly, other than in terms of rough sleeping. think my answer would be something along the lines of there seeming to be plenty of social indicators and lived experience that something isn't working about the purely data driven story. Examples that I haven't already mentioned would include the number of working homeless (the subject of that FT piece upthread). This reinforces the sense that there is something broken about being able to link employment, wage growth and gdp to wellbeing.

Some other stuff that seems relevant:

_* Employment doesn't measure whether the job is something that absolutely kills you.
_* Worker bargaining power with the decline of the unions has gone down.
_* High employment isn't seeing increased investment by business (generally assumed to be down to Brexit uncertainty) - if they're investing in capital assets not only does that affect GDP, but also it raises questions about the long-term sustainability of economic wellbeing.
_* Expanding that point about working homeless, lower income areas rely more on local public capital investment and this hasn't been happening, which means your wages don't go as far as you have to purchase 'public goods'.

With specific regard to your situation, ||||||||, I read something interesting about the US, which is that wages and GDP are going up because of a decline in the number of low-paid manufacturing jobs, but an increase in wages, a *decrease* in wages at the top end of jobs, but an increase in the number of people employed in middle-tier jobs, with wages going up there. I don't know how well this maps on to the UK, but if it did map on, it might suggest that as a highly qualified professional, you might be suffering from that squeeze in top end jobs. If I could find the bloody article I read it in, I might be able to give a bit more useful definition around 'middle tier' and 'top tier'!

brb grabbing a coffee before i read that

it's worth your while, good stuff fizzles

had to take a break to argue with the mrs about pt1

I worked at a thinktank for years & this is bollocks. The question of who finances such organisations & those working in them is critical to their proper function in democratic society & should always be asked. A lack of transparency on their funding is antithetical to democracy. https://t.co/oydcWETvuG

— James Meadway (@meadwaj) December 27, 2018

I bet he's got about a million "who funds you then" replies by now.

Great post Fizzles

One thing that Fizzles' excellent post doesn't mention is the number of people working in the gig economy, which pre-2010 didn't really exist in the way in which we understand it. Although the number of self-employed people has also grown quickly over the last eight years or so.

I'm not sure there are many reasons not to trust the figures - a combination of punitive benefits changes, lax employment regulations, self-employment and corporation tax changes would appear to support them. It doesn't mean they're good jobs or that they enable people to live a remotely sustainable or comfortable life. When you look at that issue, it always comes back to bad housing policy.

The number of people in work + low GDP also means terrible UK productivity, which also suppresses wages but that's a slightly different issue. For most of the coalition years, GDP per capita wasn't actually growing, so people weren't feeling it in their pocket.

remember when working from home was going to solve all this?

or is that still the idea, ive been off this week

Also I was going to post this, by a barrister who specialises in state aid rules, yesterday, but it was still to close to Christmas to be arsed about getting into it.

If anyone can link to a response to it from someone better-informed than, say, Aaron Bastani I'd be interested to read it. My suspicion for a while has been that "the state aid rules" has been a figleaf for Corbyn to use whenever he's under pressure from left-wing supporters over his Brexit stance, part of the fantasy of Labour's better Brexit, that falls down when you consider the detail.

Condensed version seems to be:

- Several countries within the EU or Single Market (eg Germany, Nordics etc) have been able to pursue a more active industrial strategy than the UK over the past 30 years. There are plenty of exemptions that permit this.
- The fact that the UK hasn't is largely down to decisions made by British governments that are now being blamed on the EU.
- The rules that do exist do help level the playing field, to some extent prevent corruption and cronyism and prevent things like offering corporation tax exemption to huge tech companies in exchange for investment.
- In any case believing you can opt out from the rules is incompatible with stated Labour policy of remaining within a Customs Union (or "the exact same benefits" as the Single Market). Simply put, the EU isn't going to agree to that.

https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/political-parties/labour-party/news/100781/emily-thornberry-says-jeremy-corbyn-was-too-

The anti-Semitism stick is massively overplayed by all with an axe to grind against Corbz but if you look up "she's done him no favours there, Brian" on the internet it comes up with a picture of Emily.

This is good on the various trade-offs:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/laurie-macfarlane/left-brexit-trilemma

this feels like a banner day in the making for this thread

I think the point about state aid rules - from what I can gather - is that provided you don’t want to move beyond the moderate social democracy of the 2017 manifesto, you’re fine. it’s when you look to go beyond that into the realms of democratic socialism, that various EU rules could become an issue. I read a very good piece on open democracy about this which I’ll look out

oh, it was the one matt posted...

pretty depressing read

Absent from the Lexit trilemma somehow

Mrs Brown’s Boys creator says Brexit could impact the showhttps://t.co/56VYvejPxH

— The New European (@TheNewEuropean) December 26, 2018

I'm leave now

If there's a re-referendum, could we keep that one quiet plz?

It's just a different flavour of the argument the Tories are making though? Claiming that the rules need to change and then simultaneously claiming you'll somehow be in a better position to change them from outside the club when all evidence suggests the opposite.

xxp
lol, what next - Geldof threatening to leave the country!

fuck that could def come into border negotiations

remember when working from home was going to solve all this?

or is that still the idea, ive been off this week

― gabbnebulous (darraghmac), 28. december 2018 13:25 (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Tbf, Work From Home pretty much got me through these last three years.

Thread mascot Bushy on his 2018 track record: https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2018/12/what-i-got-right-and-wrong-politics-2018

Obviously Mrs Brown's Boys is polling much better than Geldof rn. Very picky lot are the UK.

Someone snap up the film rights to this pls

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/28/john-major-horse-gift-turkmenistan-national-archives

an amusing yarn no doubt, but based on the only Gogol I've read - Dead Souls- that ‘worthy of Gogol’ from Major's private sec is fucking pushing it a bit imo.

Oh, this would be the sort of "English" films that will be the ONLY thing allowed in our brave new all hang together separate from everywhere etc.

Guardian as usual over-egging the pudding in the intro, and it would most likely be a terrible film, actual anecdote is good though.

Sincere thanks to Fizzles & Matt for the posts & links upthread, having a proper read through just now.

So John Redwood is getting a knighthood then.

For...

because someone else died and he's abhorrent cunt, still breathing.

In celebration of his knighthood: remembering the time Sir John Redwood wrote to the Telegraph to deny any suggestion that he swallows pebbles like an ostrich pic.twitter.com/YcNUlQfmwq

— Michael Deacon (@MichaelPDeacon) December 28, 2018

he's no maverick weirdo in the Stafford Cripps mold (who was a vegan and used to eat raw vegetables) but basically a cunt. Apparently his ex-wife alleges he is a mean, tight bastard and capable of severe cruelty.

Coincidentally, these being the ancient requirements for nobility