Current Politics in the United Kingdom

[hoss]

Originally Posted by Wendigo

Who knows what will happen to wages and interest rates? You don't, I certainly don't and to be honest no one does. I am looking at the longer term.

There is a science named economics that may help you to find out what is most probable to happen. My point was that it is futile to pick certain aspects that support your cause and neglect others that don´t. You will most probably have a hard Brexit and subsequently you will be part of a giant economic experiment.

You admit that there is a large uncertainty about what will happen. Why are you intent to choose uncertainty over calculability and why are you sure that you will be better off at the longer term as opposed to the short term?

[vinceprince]

Originally Posted by hoss

Dropping house prices will not help you if wages are dropping as well and interest rates are rising.

The one group that will benefit from this will be the group that overwhelmingly voted for Brexit - Pensioners.

They are likely to have no mortgage but will have savings so will benefit from higher interest rates.

Their state pension and spending power is protected from inflation by the Govt's triple lock guarantee on their state pensions.

However, those living abroad will lose out due to sterling devaluation, so many more elderly Brits may return home putting even greater pressure on the NHS and social services.

[Mal Hombre]

Originally Posted by Wendigo

Who knows what will happen to wages and interest rates? You don't, I certainly don't and to be honest no one does. I am looking at the longer term.

Except people live in the short term,Whatever trade deal You might get at the mercy of Donald Trump in three or four years,The next mortgage payment will need to be paid,There will be bills, food etc.

[hoss]

Originally Posted by Mal Hombre

Except people live in the short term

In the long run we are all dead.


John Maynard Keynes

[jacques22]

Originally Posted by seany65

Large numbers of EU citizens coming over here, possibly with little idea of the minimum wage, or the working conditions that they should be working in, are undercutting British wages and working conditions. They don't know they are doing it as it's the British bosses that are using them to do this.

This is a groundless myth that fuels the idea that immigrants are taking jobs away from the British people, which is absolutely not true.

At 4%, the UK has its lowest unemployment rate since the 1970s:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-...mployment-rate

So it's definitely not immigrants who are responsible for unemployment amongst the Brits. In fact, if you check the stats before the advent of the Single Market in 1993 and freedom of movement, you will see that the unemployment rate was much higher at 10% in 1992:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentand...et/january2019

You claim that immigrants are undercutting British wages and working conditions. Again, that is not true. Here's the example of fruit pickers:
https://www.theguardian.com/business...ld-ruin-sector

In that article, you have the farm owner, a British, saying that he's paying the minimum wage plus bonuses, but the British simply refuse to do that kind of work:

Brooks said the recruitment agency he works with also tries to get in Brits, an achievement so rare they ring a bell every time it happens.
The difficulty in recruiting locals is not about pay, he said. Pickers earn the national minimum wage for over 25-year-olds of £7.83 an hour, even if they are under that age, as well as productivity bonuses which take the average wage to between £9 and £10 an hour or up to £14 an hour for fast pickers.
They get accommodation, including utilities and transport to work, for a £40-a-week charge. Brooks said wages were up 4% to 5% year on year, partly as a result of labour shortages.
But he admitted: “The last time we had a British workforce I was in my 20s, we’re going back to the 1980s.”
(...)
One of Brooks workers said: “They say we are taking people’s jobs. They should get up at 4am and work to the evening doing this and let’s see how they do.”


You see, it's a very demanding job that very few Brits want to perform. The same with waiters in pubs and restaurants, and nurses.
I'm sure a Brexiter like Tim Martin would love to hire only British people. But the reason why he still has to hire migrant workers is because he desperately needs to fill vacancies. And migrant workers in those Wetherspoons pub get paid the same as their British colleagues. Don't think that because a British waiter is paid £7 an hour, an EU worker will only ask £5 an hour for the same job, that's a lie. Martin is the one responsible for the low pay and poor working conditions:
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices...-a8742056.html

In that article, you can hear a British employee complaining about the working conditions imposed by the British boss:
Like a lot of hospitality jobs, work at Wetherspoons is, in my opinion, underpaid and undervalued. It’s an intense and stressful job – preparing drinks and food and unclogging toilets for hours on end. Our breaks are short and unpaid. Zero-hour contracts are open to abuse by managers who have no obligation to give us enough work to survive on. Being sick means either working through the flu or losing a day’s pay and, once a set number of “trigger” days is hit, perhaps your job too.
We work unsocial hours, rarely seeing friends, but are continuously confronted with drunk, abusive and sometimes violent customers who’ll mindlessly dehumanise you into a mechanical pint pourer. You might say this is just the price you pay for working in a pub, and I am grateful to have a job of any sort, but it is also, I think, a depressing vision of how crude, mercantile Brexiteers like Martin see the world.
(...)
It appears Wetherspoons has been doing rather well out of our working conditions. Last year the company pulled in £89m in pre-tax profits; and Martin himself has accrued a tidy estimated net wealth of almost £500m.
(...)
A large proportion of Wetherspoons’ 30,000+ staff are EU nationals and yet Martin himself appears to be utterly incoherent on the issue of migrant workers’ rights. In one breath, he salutes EU citizens’ contributions to the UK’s social, cultural and economic life, and in the next he pontificates in favour of an Australia-style “points system” that prioritises the kind of “skilled” and “professional” work that, if enacted, would attack the right of his own employees to even work here.

And the sad part is that Brexit will make those working conditions much worse.
Because of Brexit, the NHS is now struggling to fill vacancies:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/h...-a8618976.html

There are many British people courageous enough to work in the healthcare sector even though it's no fun (looking after people who have cancer or Alzheimer's disease, cleaning up the mess left by geriatrics, watching people die, etc...). But because of the stress and the long hours, there aren't enough British people to fill all the vacancies, that's why you see nurses from the EU, Asia and other foreign countries (from the previous link):
“Eight per cent of social care staff are non-UK EU nationals and therefore represents one of the sectors most vulnerable to changes in migration rules.
“With people living longer, increases in costs and decreases in funding, adult social care is at breaking point. The recent report of the Migration Advisory Committee reinforces the need to improve pay and conditions for social care staff in order to attract the workforce that is needed."

And again, those migrant workers are not demanding lower wages than their British colleagues, that's a lie. They get the same pay and cope with the same working conditions.
I would love to see higher wages for fruit pickers, nurses and waiters if that can help attract more British people to fill those vacancies. But in the end, that would also mean inflation and higher prices for fruits and veggies in the supermarket, higher bills for food and drinks in the pub, and higher healthcare costs. That's the classical trade-off between the consumer and the worker.

Same with builders. That's a tough, unattractive job for most Brits, and if you want to raise wages to make the job more attractive for British people, it will impact the price of the houses and apartments that are sold.

Now, when we talk about skilled jobs, immigration is a also non-story. Migrant workers are definitely not undermining British wages and working conditions or taking jobs away from British people. Or the contrary, British companies offer top salaries to attract top talents.
An EU professor teaching foreign languages gets the job because he has a skill that the Brits don't have. The same with engineers. If a computer engineer can write top programmes or is a safe pair of hands for cyber-security, he gets the job because of his skills and talent. Same with football players, British clubs offer top money to a Van Dijk, Hazard, Aguero or whoever because they are amongst the most talented players in the world and therefore make the Premier League more attractive and a better product to sell.

[chris chunt]

In thirty years time the script for all of this will be revealed

[Dr Pepper]

Originally Posted by hoss

There is a science named economics that may help you to find out what is most probable to happen. My point was that it is futile to pick certain aspects that support your cause and neglect others that don´t. You will most probably have a hard Brexit and subsequently you will be part of a giant economic experiment.

A science that is heavy on theory-and very, very short on repeatable practice-

[DB83]

Have not read, or posted on this lately as the recent event have mirrored 'Comic Relief' except that Red-Nose Day tends to be more amusing.

St. Theresa, for the moment at least, has been thwarted in bringing her deal back to the Commons a third time. Even that echoes those that would not accept the result of the Referendum so let us get another vote and keep having votes til we get the result we want.

All eyes now on Brussels if they accept the request to defer the leave date. Of course they will but with many attached strings. But why just roll over unless that was the grand plan all along by May >> get such a bad deal that it would never pass but pretend you are following the will of the people but end up in indefinitely.

[scoundrel]

Originally Posted by jacques22

This is a groundless myth that fuels the idea that immigrants are taking jobs away from the British people, which is absolutely not true.

At 4%, the UK has its lowest unemployment rate since the 1970s:
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-...mployment-rate

So it's definitely not immigrants who are responsible for unemployment amongst the Brits. In fact, if you check the stats before the advent of the Single Market in 1993 and freedom of movement, you will see that the unemployment rate was much higher at 10% in 1992:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/employmentand...et/january2019

You claim that immigrants are undercutting British wages and working conditions. Again, that is not true. Here's the example of fruit pickers:
https://www.theguardian.com/business...ld-ruin-sector

In that article, you have the farm owner, a British, saying that he's paying the minimum wage plus bonuses, but the British simply refuse to do that kind of work:

Brooks said the recruitment agency he works with also tries to get in Brits, an achievement so rare they ring a bell every time it happens.
The difficulty in recruiting locals is not about pay, he said. Pickers earn the national minimum wage for over 25-year-olds of £7.83 an hour, even if they are under that age, as well as productivity bonuses which take the average wage to between £9 and £10 an hour or up to £14 an hour for fast pickers.
They get accommodation, including utilities and transport to work, for a £40-a-week charge. Brooks said wages were up 4% to 5% year on year, partly as a result of labour shortages.
But he admitted: “The last time we had a British workforce I was in my 20s, we’re going back to the 1980s.”
(...)
One of Brooks workers said: “They say we are taking people’s jobs. They should get up at 4am and work to the evening doing this and let’s see how they do.”


You see, it's a very demanding job that very few Brits want to perform. The same with waiters in pubs and restaurants, and nurses.
I'm sure a Brexiter like Tim Martin would love to hire only British people. But the reason why he still has to hire migrant workers is because he desperately needs to fill vacancies. And migrant workers in those Wetherspoons pub get paid the same as their British colleagues. Don't think that because a British waiter is paid £7 an hour, an EU worker will only ask £5 an hour for the same job, that's a lie. Martin is the one responsible for the low pay and poor working conditions:
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices...-a8742056.html

In that article, you can hear a British employee complaining about the working conditions imposed by the British boss:
Like a lot of hospitality jobs, work at Wetherspoons is, in my opinion, underpaid and undervalued. It’s an intense and stressful job – preparing drinks and food and unclogging toilets for hours on end. Our breaks are short and unpaid. Zero-hour contracts are open to abuse by managers who have no obligation to give us enough work to survive on. Being sick means either working through the flu or losing a day’s pay and, once a set number of “trigger” days is hit, perhaps your job too.
We work unsocial hours, rarely seeing friends, but are continuously confronted with drunk, abusive and sometimes violent customers who’ll mindlessly dehumanise you into a mechanical pint pourer. You might say this is just the price you pay for working in a pub, and I am grateful to have a job of any sort, but it is also, I think, a depressing vision of how crude, mercantile Brexiteers like Martin see the world.
(...)
It appears Wetherspoons has been doing rather well out of our working conditions. Last year the company pulled in £89m in pre-tax profits; and Martin himself has accrued a tidy estimated net wealth of almost £500m.
(...)
A large proportion of Wetherspoons’ 30,000+ staff are EU nationals and yet Martin himself appears to be utterly incoherent on the issue of migrant workers’ rights. In one breath, he salutes EU citizens’ contributions to the UK’s social, cultural and economic life, and in the next he pontificates in favour of an Australia-style “points system” that prioritises the kind of “skilled” and “professional” work that, if enacted, would attack the right of his own employees to even work here.

And the sad part is that Brexit will make those working conditions much worse.
Because of Brexit, the NHS is now struggling to fill vacancies:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/h...-a8618976.html

There are many British people courageous enough to work in the healthcare sector even though it's no fun (looking after people who have cancer or Alzheimer's disease, cleaning up the mess left by geriatrics, watching people die, etc...). But because of the stress and the long hours, there aren't enough British people to fill all the vacancies, that's why you see nurses from the EU, Asia and other foreign countries (from the previous link):
“Eight per cent of social care staff are non-UK EU nationals and therefore represents one of the sectors most vulnerable to changes in migration rules.
“With people living longer, increases in costs and decreases in funding, adult social care is at breaking point. The recent report of the Migration Advisory Committee reinforces the need to improve pay and conditions for social care staff in order to attract the workforce that is needed."

And again, those migrant workers are not demanding lower wages than their British colleagues, that's a lie. They get the same pay and cope with the same working conditions.
I would love to see higher wages for fruit pickers, nurses and waiters if that can help attract more British people to fill those vacancies. But in the end, that would also mean inflation and higher prices for fruits and veggies in the supermarket, higher bills for food and drinks in the pub, and higher healthcare costs. That's the classical trade-off between the consumer and the worker.

Same with builders. That's a tough, unattractive job for most Brits, and if you want to raise wages to make the job more attractive for British people, it will impact the price of the houses and apartments that are sold.

Now, when we talk about skilled jobs, immigration is a also non-story. Migrant workers are definitely not undermining British wages and working conditions or taking jobs away from British people. Or the contrary, British companies offer top salaries to attract top talents.
An EU professor teaching foreign languages gets the job because he has a skill that the Brits don't have. The same with engineers. If a computer engineer can write top programmes or is a safe pair of hands for cyber-security, he gets the job because of his skills and talent. Same with football players, British clubs offer top money to a Van Dijk, Hazard, Aguero or whoever because they are amongst the most talented players in the world and therefore make the Premier League more attractive and a better product to sell.

What usually happens in a situation of near-full employment is that the price of labour increases. But this requires there to be a labour shortage, and as matters currently stand, there is an inexhaustible pool of overseas labour which can enter the country freely and fill vacancies. Therefore, until the rest of the European Union is also operating at a 4% unemployment level, close to effective full employment, there is no labour shortage and wages, particularly in strenuous but unskilled jobs such as harvesting fruit and vegetables, are held low.

The low level of these wages and the prevelance of overseas workers in those occupations are co-related and are not a coincidence. British workers are denied a proper living wage and overseas workers are mistreated by the dirisory pay level they get for extremely hard work. This is a good example of how the free movement of labour is a freedom for bosses and not a freedom for workers.

I know a woman whose father was a bus driver for Arriva - the bus company managers scrutinised his bus like a hawk looking for the tiniest scratch in the paint, because they could hand him an official warning, one of three which would enable them to fire him. He was on one of the old contracts and earning > £25K a year, which is hardly a King's ransom for driving a double decker bus in London traffic. But they could replace him with an EU driver who would be willing to drive for £7.90 an hour and whose EU bus driver's licence would be automatically valid in London.

This isn't fairy tales. The free movement of labour undermines pay and conditions for British workers.

[hoss]

Originally Posted by Dr Pepper

A science that is heavy on theory-and very, very short on repeatable practice-

As you are intent on repeating the policy of the inter-war era, we will soon see if the outcome is the same.