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conversely, reaction against the non-domiciled status is precisely about reacting against rootless cosmopolitans (so to speak) that choose to base themselves in Britain whilst operating their businesses elsewhere. in service-economy terms this is an unambiguous gain in economic activity, but the associated shift toward servility and genuflection is more than a little bit unsettling. The non-dom status is a poor fit with an immigration system geared to encourage entrenched UK participation - if Britain wants to exercise soft power by convincing the world's elites to base themselves in London, it's probably better if they don't acquire some permanent residency or business interest in the UK and feel obliged to remain sensibly meek lest they be asked to go home. Send your kids to some public school, but don't stick out. Don't buy football clubs, even if you can afford it. Don't let your kid date English starlets. Maintain a deferential voice in domestic politics. In short, a degree of invisibility which a contemporary Home Office seems unlikely to want to discretionarily enforce. And if it can't, then non-dom is a poor way to buy soft power. you're supposed to influence the politics of other countries, not the other way around ronya fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Apr 8, 2015 |
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Apr 8, 2015 15:02
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BigPaddy posted:Places like Qatar and Dubai are built on deaths of mainly immigrant workers in modern day slave states. Qatar and Dubai would be mind-bogglingly rich regardless. It is the wealth of Kerala that is built on remittances from those slave systems - draining nearly 10% of the domestic population and remitting huge sums of money, allowing Kerala to purchase first-world social development indicators with a third-world level of labour productivity. Kerala exported all of its oppression, so to speak. Awkward bargain, but such as it is.
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Apr 9, 2015 15:26
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Britain's politics was immensely horrible for managing the explosion of North Sea oil revenue Labour wanted to use it to boost employment and wages. Conservatives wanted to use it to cut taxes. In the end, both got a chunk of what they wanted, with both convincing themselves that cashing it in immediately to their supporters counted as investment somehow. It didn't. There's no reason to think that this has changed - that alone is an excellent argument for a squirreling it in a sovereign wealth fund. At least there the tendency towards idiocy points in less destructive directions.
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Apr 9, 2015 15:58
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Providing services, now or in the future, is not investment. This is the same rhetorical dodge pulled in the 70s and 80s, too - (free!) public services are a Good Thing and investment is a Good Thing and therefore your mind conflates the two in a merry mess.
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Apr 9, 2015 16:03
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baka kaba posted:I'm not sure answering Q. we're hosed, everything's falling apart and we have all this money, what should we do with it? with A. nothing at all! is particularly helpful The answer is indeed "[almost] nothing at all", for the simple reason that it is not plausible to ramp up the construction of physical infrastructure just to meet the revenue boom. There's no point bidding up the sterling and murdering what's left of non-oil exporters. All you would be doing is showering Britons in the present with US dollars to buy imports. (do remember, at this point, that investment in public infrastructure is not the one and the same thing as "investing" in the labour that builds or runs it, by which one means paying them vastly more when, unsurprisingly, there are only so many crane operators/whatever available) at its core, if you have an answer to the question "we're hosed, everything's falling apart" that is miraculously both (1) a good answer, and (2) politically tenable as sufficiently broad long-term consensus, then "and we have all this money" shouldn't actually change the calculus that much. Either the political coalition underpinning that answer is sustainable, or it isn't. If it is - if it is Wonderful Scandinavian Social Democracy - then the oil revenue should be used to drag its survival as far as possible. If it isn't, then they shouldn't get to ransack the windfall anyway.
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Apr 9, 2015 16:22
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It's not impossible, you know, there are very small open economies that can turn on a dime to exploit the heck out of a windfall. But Britain is, first, not that small. It can't do the Singapore/Dubai/whatnot thing of importing whole deciles of its own population in guest workers and then kicking them all back out within years, just to turn explosions of cash into poured concrete now now now now now. And second - even if it had the civil-social wherewithal to withstand such traumatic shocks - British politics isn't that nimble anyway.
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Apr 9, 2015 16:30
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baka kaba posted:I'm not talking about paying people more as a stimulus - which, by the way, I don't exactly see as a bad thing when they're getting the raw end of austerity. But I'm talking about investment in the future - building the things we need, that will save money and provide for the future. You sound like you're arguing that selling a few billion barrels of oil over a long period would somehow irrevocably tank ~the markets~ so we should bury it in the back yard out of sheer confusion and terror. It's too powerful! The oil is sold. Britain can't use a lot more oil for itself in a hurry, so functionally what this means is that the oil is sold to other countries. Very well. What are you intending to buy from those other countries with that oil? But let's use the house metaphor. Let's say your house is falling down because nobody cares to maintain it. Your Tory housemates, who are pricks, oppose the idea of passing a bag around every year to fix stuff. Sadly they outnumber you, so the house quietly continues to sink into the swamp or whatever. Your housemates say that your best option is to rightsize, which is a nice word for moving to a smaller, crappier, house, which would be by definition crappier but allegedly small enough for the contributions of these misers to maintain it. Suddenly your address wins a lottery. You can fix all the house's immediate issues, but next year it's going to have more, and still the next, &c. Do you spend the excess on a garage and a swimming pool - all of which would add even more maintenance next year - or do you sock it away in the sinking fund? Your housemates, by the way, have already indicated that if there's going to be any excess going around, they think they should be given it to, you know, do business stuff with. It'll mean they'll give more money to maintain the house with next year, they promise. And somehow they still outnumber you.
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Apr 9, 2015 17:14
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a change-in-change graph is rather misleading. Anybody got the actual levels? there's this on voting intention but not party leader approval: 
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Apr 9, 2015 17:22
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baka kaba posted:Uh you spend the excess on permanently fixing the underlying issues, like draining the swamp and fixing the foundations? And maybe put in some insulation to cut down on your energy bills. That's what I mean by investing in infrastructure and saving money in the future, with the plus that while you're doing it you can stimulate the economy with some activity. Nobody's talking about building more Millennium Domes or gold statues to David Cameron, we're talking about investing in transport and energy and social housing. and we're back to "investing" not being the same thing as pledging to give away a permanently higher level of stuff. You're missing the crucial bit where you become able to afford to give away a permanently higher level of stuff. Sorta plausible with transport, a little dodgy with energy, and completely giving the game away the moment you went on to name social housing it's an excellent demonstration of the labour end of the not-being-able-to-handle-large-windfalls-without-going-crazy thesis, really. You have to articulate why you think that these projects are (1) ones that generate a return in the future, i.e., are investments, and (2) whose cost-benefit analysis is apparently flipped from negative to positive under a slight decrease in the domestic real rate of interest. Which is really what's going on here. draining the swamp is regrettably not obvious outside the metaphor, since these costs in the metaphor are an allusion to the bills that a welfare state needs to pay for the existence of people who are old, poor, unhealthy, or all three. It is regrettably difficult to permanently reduce these costs in the future, even with highly sweeping changes in the present. Maybe if you cured diabetes with the funds or something, I dunno. Certainly vast social transformation is not on the table, which is the point I was making re: nimbleness. It's tantamount to a fantasy that by a quick blast of cash, Britain can be maneuvered into a new and sustainable political consensus underpinning a new and sustainable welfare/taxation arrangement, in this case via infrastructure increasing productivity increasing wages increasing revenue and therefore nobody has to make any unpleasant choices at all, not even for higher taxes. This was probably true in 1946. It's a little hard to believe in 2016. For virtually all infrastructure that is a good idea, it is not necessary for the oil to exist to afford it - this isn't Bretton Woods, Britain can borrow readily if it wants to - the problem is the politics. By a burst of greasiness in political horse-trading, Britain can craft a coalition supporting far-sighted social democracy? I don't think so.
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Apr 9, 2015 18:13
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as I've remarked before, the problem with rail renationalization is less the nationalization itself and more the politics that happens when specific rail policies come back into play as public policy it's safe for backbenchers to mutter about it but the people who must form actual governments can also see the actual day when the blame for train disruption is dumped at your feet and the RMT despises you anyway
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Apr 10, 2015 02:36
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LemonDrizzle posted:I'm not sure whether this says more about the state of the housing market and people's incomes or the Lib Dems' desperation: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/10/help-to-rent-scheme-for-young-people-proposed-by-liberal-democrats that's astonishingly pathetic as election carrots go I don't know if it's desperate per se, rather than Orange Book Lib Dem orientations just straightforwardly having little to say about housing. If "doesn't require any actual spending or upset any interest groups" is a requirement, then any housing policy plan is moribund from the start. It's a policy area with precious few third-way free lunches. ronya fucked around with this message at 10:27 on Apr 10, 2015 |
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Apr 10, 2015 10:24
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With tuition fees, the math on how much additional revenue those graduates would generate is so fuzzy that you can always insist that it's affordable with a straight face, at least until you're actually coalition partner. With housing there's less scope for bullshit.
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Apr 10, 2015 10:37
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I know certain parties are labelling Miliband as "Red Ed", but I didn't know it had become fashionable for left-wing cartoonists to paint Milibandism as non-New-Labourite
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Apr 10, 2015 17:54
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It wouldn't really surprise me if the Tories were still stuck in "so, uh, we weren't really expecting to be in government rather than merely making attacks from the opposition benches" mode five years on
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Apr 13, 2015 03:17
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home ownership is like local government devolution: it forces people to accept certain realities that governments are constrained by, rather than indulging in wishful thinking the invest-vs-buy calculation is a bit like that. It's a bit weird if you think about it - why would rental ever not track the market-expected yield on real estate? Shouldn't the calculation be driven by demand-side lifestyle choices on mobility? But unless home ownership is widespread, most people would not have actually-significant stakes in that calculation and would be prone to flights of fancy on How Rent Actually Works And Why I Deserve To Pay Less And Receive More. Then those people try to vote themselves into an alternate reality, fail, become immensely upset, winters of discontent, etc. - one thing in common with housing protests of the 1970s - Covent Garden, Homes before Roads, etc. - is that they all opposed things which would permit more housing at the inconvenience of the housing they already had. It is only when people must pay for their own individual housing - that is, when the national housing constraints felt by planners make themselves known at an individual level - that they discard their protest placards. They would not yield to the ten year plans of urban planners, but they would yield to Foxton's. (in a nutshell: neoliberalism)
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Apr 14, 2015 07:31
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(note that, even in the functional-finance perspective given in that essay, "we're not prepared to commit to deficits that we would have to pay back with primary surpluses at some point in the future" is the one and the same as "we're not prepared to commit to deficit-driven inflation that we would have to pay back with surplus-driven disinflation at some point in the future". We could call voters being terrified of future primary surpluses Ricardian Paranoia, perhaps. And yet here we are, in the age of Labour openly selling itself to the public as the party of zero-deficit, fully-funded fiscal discipline. also, it fudges slightly between bonds-as-liquidity and bonds-as-security. To translate: "the private sector is willing to pay HM Treasury to move volatility from the private to the public sector, and we should take that deal". Maybe so, and possibly a good idea, but don't pretend it's a free lunch)
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Apr 15, 2015 05:07
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Lib Dem always subsisted on upper-middle-income (or eventually upper-middle-income, i.e., graduate) voters who materially benefit from Thatcher-era reforms and can't really identify with left-wing positions predating it, and yet are averse to Thatcher-era right-wing attitudes which seem antiquated and tainted That always depended, perversely, on Blair tainting Labour so that that culture wars would make the party brand icky. Now that Ed (who we have agreed is Red, apparently, "The Party of Fiscal Responsibility" be damned) is on the scene, Lib Dem would have trouble finding its niche.
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Apr 17, 2015 10:04
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"Victim industry" is a loaded term, try "moral panic".
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Apr 17, 2015 10:57
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Guavanaut posted:I for one am very interested that she and so many other Britons want an 'Australian style' system of immigration for Britain. No, it's where your domestic left-wing is completely unable to persuade the domestic electorate to accept family and refugee immigration as stemming from fundamental individual human rights, in part because your neighbours persist in doing things their own way and, unlike Europe, cannot be pressured or talked into doing things differently. Hanging people, caning people, being politically repressive, etc. The Soviet bloc was pretty repressive too but it had the decency to feel pressured to pretend that it wasn't. Southeast Asia, on the other hand, has an active precedent of having their navies blockade refugee ships and then insisting that it was entitled to do so. In that atmosphere it is hard to sustain a consensus that your own country is nonetheless obliged to accept immigrants. This has a contextual element where the left in Australia is much more attached to zero-growth greenism and the idea of Australia as a country on the perpetual verge of ecological collapse, and is therefore less amenable to immigration. Also, the main experience in SEA over refugees was Vietnam, many of whom returned to Vietnam once Vietnam re-embraced capitalism. There's fewer vivid memories of escaping ethnic cleansing. Rotherham only just happened in the UK, but the Sydney gang rapes happened in 2000. All this favours a more hostile attitude towards immigration and less "workers of the world unite" multicultural openness. The only good thing about UKIP shifting stances here is the achingly slow move of the rhetoric toward the reality of contemporary developed-world immigration stemming partly from highly-skilled migrants (which the Tories have already clamped down on, can you guess why?) and partly from family/refugee migration (a topic on which the UK has committed to international agreements). A points system only affects the latter; the former is already points-based.
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Apr 18, 2015 07:39
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for people buying £1,000 to £10,000 of the shares, to be precise, if you had any doubt about the intended demographic of this carrot e: RandomPauI posted:That makes it sound like a bribe. there's a facially legitimate justification, in the sense of ensuring a wider representation of small shareholders as a political vision in itself. This used to be a popular way to formalize the intuition of a nation of shopkeepers in a contemporary age announced at this time, though, it's obviously an electoral carrot ronya fucked around with this message at 09:19 on Apr 19, 2015 |
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Apr 19, 2015 09:12
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the new party of the working class, by which we mean wage labour who are nonetheless earning a sufficiently high wage that they're hostile to working class identity politics
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Apr 19, 2015 09:25
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quote:Labour is to raise the prospect of further parts of the rail network being taken back into public ownership when it announces plans to subject franchises to a competitive bid between the state and private sector as they come up for renewal. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jul/03/rail-network-franchises-labour-plan July last year. Notice the positioning. The election had to be closer before those parties - the rail unions and Labour backbenchers - would shut up.
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Apr 19, 2015 13:30
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short of recolonizing Tunisia and Libya, there's no real way for any European state to tackle the problems driving people to the ships in the first place
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Apr 19, 2015 15:18
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LemonDrizzle posted:we could turn Europe into a bankrupt wartorn hellhole that nobody in their right mind would want to enter  Ecclesiastes 1:9
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Apr 19, 2015 15:43
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Rivers of Blood was 1968, precipitated by the earlier tide of Commonwealth immigration from the East Indies the Ugandan crisis was precipitated by Idi Amin ethnically cleansing Uganda in 1971, a decade after independence in 1962. the dynamics were a little different; certainly closer to today's crises, in the key respect of "wait, is this still our fault? I thought we were quits?" post-revolutionary leaders having the wrong politics - being neither palatable to increasingly racially-sensitive 1970s Eurocommunist sensibilities nor to unreconstructed Monday Club Tory types of the era - is also a familiar sensation, too ronya fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Apr 19, 2015 |
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Apr 19, 2015 15:53
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Translation: Westminster City Council spent that much to bribe the council tenant to screw off so that they could refurbish the place.
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Apr 19, 2015 16:23
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I think you'll find he can blame it on British divide-and-conquer regardless
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Apr 19, 2015 16:59
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the party of the civil servant in the Blair era was Lib Dem, no?
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Apr 20, 2015 15:12
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Teach posted:From the last page - I just popped in to post that, and I should have know that I'd be beaten. Still - have these - I feel obliged to point out that the attitude that wealth is obtained through a zero-sum struggle is exactly what enables such toxic anti-immigrant sentiments
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Apr 21, 2015 10:18
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big scary monsters posted:Only everyone in the EU, EEA and Switzerland. Other overseas students pay the same huge fees in Scotland as they do at all UK universities. anecdotally, twinning courses are widely disrespected - it is too often the case that the syllabus is completely different. This is especially the case for undergraduates in courses taught heavily by graduate students, and it's impossible for an outsider to gauge just what is going on in the distance campus. The promise that exam scripts are returned to the UK to be marked can be invalidated by rampant collusive cheating at the twin. employers don't value such skills as such, but with a distance campus your ability to sell your network or even simply use your degree as a status credential all disappear if you went to the local twin.
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Apr 24, 2015 03:37
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Mister Adequate posted:I will participate in my civic duty of voting for a candidate to represent me in the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. can't discard the nationalist label and still maintain a left-ish image without being called out for running on policies that favour the middle class
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Apr 24, 2015 05:17
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directly elected mayors were always a way to enforce the legitimacy of neoliberal reforms in a political environment full of Militant tendency socialists - that is, a peculiar ideological disposition that incapacitates itself when faced with a reality of political constraints on local government revenue. It's a magical process - instead of councillors who all, individually, make hay out of attacking The Man whilst somehow never being The Man themselves, you have this powerful executive position that rolls the nominal responsibility for budget cuts and the credit for council tax cuts all into one. and because militants are militants, at no point does their framework let them figure out that a local government, by design, is both dependent on regressive taxes for revenue and produces only local mandates, not the necessarily national mandate that would be needed for national redistribution. So the deck is stacked to enforce budget constraints at a low level, and enforcing budget constraints at a low level binds localist populist socialism. ironically that is an essentially neoliberal insight. but directly elected local executives were also always vulnerable to city machine ethnic politics, it's the essence of city machine politics since city machines were a thing in the 19th century. when the size of the pie is rigidly limited, then of course successful politics revolves around promising a tight and cohesive group of supporters a bigger slice, and divisions erupt along the most salient way to divide the electorate into insiders and outsiders - that is, visible ethnicity. now it turns out that central government can annex local government if you pull this sort of stuff anyway. The central govt is immune to local capture by concentrated ethnic groups. But can you see the failure mode? It's rather obvious - capture a local executive position along some axis that is nationally salient, do irresponsible things whilst plausibly fudging the numbers, and then let the central govt to shut you down. That is, a local politician who gets to make hay out of attacking The Man whilst never being The Man himself. But such theater is an ill fit with the council, which is itself split along that axis. Minority councilors grumble about dysfunction. Clearly reform is needed! How about empowering the council to check the local executive more carefully...?
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Apr 25, 2015 08:46
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I'll admit to being surprised that his electoral fraud was so egregious. If the heavens opened and a host of angels marched down to pronounce upon Rahman's motivations, I would expect that he genuinely didn't have much to do with the intimidation on the ground or the antics of his cronies. That element may be due to overenthusiasm, expectations that what flies in Dhaka flies in Tower Hamlets, and a siege mentality after the Labour expulsion. I totally think he was favouring his cronies in the bidding process for council services and property sales, though.
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Apr 25, 2015 11:25
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Prince John posted:I can't see a good way out for them with respect to their potential Scottish voters. If they don't move to the left, the SNP can point the figure and say "Tories-lite". If they do move to the left, it validates the SNP narrative of them being needed to keep Labour honest. strategically speaking, they don't need to pull voters back to Labour inasmuch as disillusion voters of SNP given the fractious nature of the SNP tent, that might not be difficult
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Apr 27, 2015 11:20
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I wonder whether the Tories would whip their own members into voting down Trident renewal just to watch the SNP squirm (nah, they won't. It'd be funny though)
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Apr 27, 2015 11:39
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maybe a strategist told them that they're not realistically going to win, so it's time to start crafting soundbites to batter a weak minority government with
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Apr 29, 2015 07:14
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LemonDrizzle posted:George Osborne, Hansard, 26th November 2009: that's not really fair it makes a sort of sense for a minority non-coalition government that is trying to wrangle a way to take its favoured bargaining chips off the table. in these situations, it is genuinely the case that the same composition of parties may be able to form majorities favouring a cycling series of contradictory motions (e.g., A > B > C > A in turn) and some manner of forcing an explicit repeal would stabilize bargaining
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Apr 29, 2015 09:49
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Pissflaps posted:How can he promise to deliver legislation that will take these 'chips off the table' if their agreement is required to enact the legislation in the first place? one guess: "no tax increases" > "increase taxes to fund general programmes that help a lot of people but only by a small amount" > "increase taxes to fund particular issues important to third party deciding votes, e.g. university tuition subsidies, or assorted scottish complaints" > "no tax increases"
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Apr 29, 2015 10:05
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I don't get why it's self-evidently better for a prospective reform to encourage a vote for the candidate rather than the party, given a strong whip system under FPTP, where policy is mostly formed by party executives anyway at least as far as local services are concerned, the UK seems to be steadily sliding to a situation of intermeshing elected devolved authorities - your MP ceases to become a substantive advocate for local services regardless. ronya fucked around with this message at 11:24 on Apr 29, 2015 |
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Apr 29, 2015 11:22
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a system that seems imminently likely to put a lot of ukippers in parliament would bring out a pro-multiculture sense of righteous fervour to grassroots mobilization in London which, if nothing else, would at least generate some kind of cohesive narrative for the moderate left if Chirac could get in on votez-escro-pas-fascho way back when, even the most unvarnished of Blairites probably would too
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Apr 29, 2015 11:50
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