It didn't seem hysterical at the time. I'm still surprised that the referendum WASN'T fixed.
Brexit voters are not thick, not racist: just poor
- Thread starter Blackleaf
- Start date
It didn't seem hysterical at the time. I'm still surprised that the referendum WASN'T fixed.
I'm not a hysteric. I'm a sane, rational, calm, sensible man.
That's why I thought the Establishment would rig the referendum.
George Osborne was pulling together his final budget before the general election. The austerity chancellor had already hacked billions from health, education and social security; now he planned to slash billions more. But he had prepared one massive give-away: the complete abolition of taxes on savings, worth well over £1bn in lost revenue.
It was costly, at a time when the government was cutting to the bone. It was unjust, throwing millions at the richest, who needed it least. And it was a kick in the teeth to all those whose lives had been turned upside down in the past five years. The idea was blocked by Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrat coalition partners.
Osborne’s response is recorded by David Laws, Clegg’s ally in government negotiations. It ranks as among the most revealing things ever said about the Conservatives’ austerity strategy.
The multi-million-pound spending spree wasn’t justifiable, admitted Osborne, according to Laws’ recent memoir, Coalition “It will only really be of help to stupid, affluent and lazy people, who can’t be bothered to put their savings away into tax-efficient vehicles!” said Osborne. “But it will still be very popular – we have polled it.”
Disabled people could kill themselves to put an end to the government’s reign of terror, and the chancellor would shrug.
Working-class kids could live on foodbank lunches and ministers would claim they had no alternative. But shovelling cash at the people seen as undeserving by their very own benefactor? That, Mr Austerity would happily do. Anything to buy votes.
Under him, Britain has endured its weakest recovery in well over 100 years. The average worker is still worse off than they were before the banks collapsed in 2008. The chancellor, who promised a march of the makers, has presided over the collapse of our steel industry. The enemy of government borrowing has bequeathed to the nation a public debt burden almost three times what it was when Margaret Thatcher was ejected from office.
The arch defender of our credit rating has seen Britain lose its AAA status. And now he leaves the country staring into what David Blanchflower – the former Bank of England rate-setter who predicted the last crash – now warns could be “a crisis bigger than Lehman Brothers: a political and economic disaster”.
Osborne’s fiscal rules have been either broken or discarded, and where their replacement should be is instead a complete vacuum.
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...oked-recovery-brexit-legacy-referendum-revolt
It was costly, at a time when the government was cutting to the bone. It was unjust, throwing millions at the richest, who needed it least. And it was a kick in the teeth to all those whose lives had been turned upside down in the past five years. The idea was blocked by Nick Clegg and his Liberal Democrat coalition partners.
Osborne’s response is recorded by David Laws, Clegg’s ally in government negotiations. It ranks as among the most revealing things ever said about the Conservatives’ austerity strategy.
The multi-million-pound spending spree wasn’t justifiable, admitted Osborne, according to Laws’ recent memoir, Coalition “It will only really be of help to stupid, affluent and lazy people, who can’t be bothered to put their savings away into tax-efficient vehicles!” said Osborne. “But it will still be very popular – we have polled it.”
Disabled people could kill themselves to put an end to the government’s reign of terror, and the chancellor would shrug.
Working-class kids could live on foodbank lunches and ministers would claim they had no alternative. But shovelling cash at the people seen as undeserving by their very own benefactor? That, Mr Austerity would happily do. Anything to buy votes.
Under him, Britain has endured its weakest recovery in well over 100 years. The average worker is still worse off than they were before the banks collapsed in 2008. The chancellor, who promised a march of the makers, has presided over the collapse of our steel industry. The enemy of government borrowing has bequeathed to the nation a public debt burden almost three times what it was when Margaret Thatcher was ejected from office.
The arch defender of our credit rating has seen Britain lose its AAA status. And now he leaves the country staring into what David Blanchflower – the former Bank of England rate-setter who predicted the last crash – now warns could be “a crisis bigger than Lehman Brothers: a political and economic disaster”.
Osborne’s fiscal rules have been either broken or discarded, and where their replacement should be is instead a complete vacuum.
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...oked-recovery-brexit-legacy-referendum-revolt
We needed austerity after the masive debt that thirteen years of Labour Government saddled us with.
Interesting to see that the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, has said he will reverse many of Osborne's austerity measures. I'm not sure how he can do that without imposing more debt upon the country.
Interesting to see that the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, has said he will reverse many of Osborne's austerity measures. I'm not sure how he can do that without imposing more debt upon the country.
Never happen we're far too polite to say sh_t in public.
Boris is already poised to bleach the uk white thanks to ms. may and if the donald grabs the brass ring pale faces will confirm that racism in the u.s. is purely a myth. Look we had an off colour president does that spell racism?.
If there were no borders who would provide your welfare check ?
And who would cover emergency medivac ?
Oh I see. So if there's there's no borders and we're all Earthlings, then how can you constantly whine about how this land was stolen?
The economy isn’t working for millions of our people. Real wages have fallen, insecurity and low-paid jobs are spreading, investment is stagnating, corporate scandals are multiplying and Britain is heading for another downturn.
Economic failure is a central reason why people are no longer prepared to accept politics as usual. It’s one of the reasons I was elected Labour leader in a landslide 10 months ago – and why there can be no going back to a broken economic model or the politics of the past. Even Theresa May understands she has to pay lip service to change in the workplace and the boardroom.
In the past couple of weeks, a string of high street corporate names – Sports Direct, BHS, Lloyds, Byron burger chain – has driven home the reality faced by a huge number of workers today: a race to the bottom in insecurity, low pay, stress and exploitation.
String of corporate governance scandals prompts Labour leader to press for laws forcing large companies to recognise specific unions to negotiate with.
We have record employment, but also record levels of poverty among those in in work. More than 6 million workers earn less than the living wage. Work for millions has become insecure and stressful. We have to change that. Sports Direct’s huge Shirebrook warehouse is on the site of a colliery that employed large numbers of well-paid, unionised, skilled workers. Today, thousands are employed as agency workers and on zero-hours contracts.
Migrant workers are often targets for that exploitation – underpaid and brutally discarded, as we saw in the past week at Byron.
The Fawley oil refinery provides an alternative. Unionised workers on £125 per day saw workers brought in from Italy and Bulgaria on just £48. Last week, impending industrial action won backdated pay parity for their co-workers. By working together through their union, the workforce stopped established workers being undercut and migrant workers being exploited.
These exploitative practices are spreading through our economy and Labour under my leadership will back action to end them.
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...-strengthening-workers-rights-labour-priority
Economic failure is a central reason why people are no longer prepared to accept politics as usual. It’s one of the reasons I was elected Labour leader in a landslide 10 months ago – and why there can be no going back to a broken economic model or the politics of the past. Even Theresa May understands she has to pay lip service to change in the workplace and the boardroom.
In the past couple of weeks, a string of high street corporate names – Sports Direct, BHS, Lloyds, Byron burger chain – has driven home the reality faced by a huge number of workers today: a race to the bottom in insecurity, low pay, stress and exploitation.
String of corporate governance scandals prompts Labour leader to press for laws forcing large companies to recognise specific unions to negotiate with.
We have record employment, but also record levels of poverty among those in in work. More than 6 million workers earn less than the living wage. Work for millions has become insecure and stressful. We have to change that. Sports Direct’s huge Shirebrook warehouse is on the site of a colliery that employed large numbers of well-paid, unionised, skilled workers. Today, thousands are employed as agency workers and on zero-hours contracts.
Migrant workers are often targets for that exploitation – underpaid and brutally discarded, as we saw in the past week at Byron.
The Fawley oil refinery provides an alternative. Unionised workers on £125 per day saw workers brought in from Italy and Bulgaria on just £48. Last week, impending industrial action won backdated pay parity for their co-workers. By working together through their union, the workforce stopped established workers being undercut and migrant workers being exploited.
These exploitative practices are spreading through our economy and Labour under my leadership will back action to end them.
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...-strengthening-workers-rights-labour-priority
And many of these immigrants are married into old stock Canadian families like mine. Are you proposing that old-stock Canadians who don't inbreed are traitors to the Canadian Reich now?
It's called the free market, whereby the company hires whoever is most qualified for the job. Why does the British Ministry of Education not spend more on public education and trades and professional training for the underpaid?
You don't create jobs by kicking the job creators out. You create access to the jobs that are omnipresent by raising people's qualifications. Don't blame immigrants for being more qualified than the locals.
I'm sure patriots would be willing to pay more tax. Austerity is necessary in the face of debt, but it must be wise too. Certain key areas must never succomb to austerity: public education and trades and professional education for the underpaid.
Those are key investments that are essential even in the most austere of times short of an all-out war economy.
Spending on the NHS should be ringfenced. Spending on defence should go up. The 0.7% of GDP spent on foreign aid is way too high and should be slashed, with the money spent on more warplanes, warships and military personnel.
Francis Fukuyama writes in a recent excellent essay in Foreign Affairs: “‘Populism’ is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don’t like.” Populism is a movement against the status quo. It represents the beginnings of something new, though it is generally much clearer about what it is against than what it is for. It can be progressive or reactionary, but more usually both.
Brexit is a classic example of such populism. It has overturned a fundamental cornerstone of UK policy since the early 1970s. Though ostensibly about Europe, it was in fact about much more: a cri de coeur from those who feel they have lost out and been left behind, whose living standards have stagnated or worse since the 1980s, who feel dislocated by large-scale immigration over which they have no control and who face an increasingly insecure and casualised labour market. Their revolt has paralysed the governing elite, already claimed one prime minister, and left the latest one fumbling around in the dark looking for divine inspiration.
The re-emergence of class should not be confused with the labour movement. They are not synonymous: this is obvious in the US and increasingly the case in the UK. Indeed, over the last half-century, there has been a growing separation between the two in Britain. The re-emergence of the working class as a political voice in Britain, most notably in the Brexit vote, can best be described as an inchoate expression of resentment and protest, with only a very weak sense of belonging to the labour movement.
Just as the Labour party took far too long to come to terms with the rise of Thatcherism and the birth of a new era at the end of the 70s, now it could not grasp that the Thatcherite paradigm, which they eventually came to embrace in the form of New Labour, had finally run its course. Labour, like everyone else, is obliged to think anew. The membership in their antipathy to New Labour turned to someone who had never accepted the latter, who was the polar opposite in almost every respect of Blair, and embodying an authenticity and decency which Blair patently did not.
Corbyn is not a product of the new times, he is a throwback to the late 70s and early 80s. That is both his strength and also his weakness. He is uncontaminated by the New Labour legacy because he has never accepted it. But nor, it would seem, does he understand the nature of the new era. The danger is that he is possessed of feet of clay in what is a highly fluid and unpredictable political environment, devoid of any certainties of almost any kind, in which Labour finds itself dangerously divided and weakened.
Labour may be in intensive care, but the condition of the Conservatives is not a great deal better.
The reasons are not difficult to explain. The hyper-globalisation era has been systematically stacked in favour of capital against labour: international trading agreements, drawn up in great secrecy, with business on the inside and the unions and citizens excluded, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being but the latest examples; the politico-legal attack on the unions; the encouragement of large-scale immigration in both the US and Europe that helped to undermine the bargaining power of the domestic workforce; and the failure to retrain displaced workers in any meaningful way.
more
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...h-of-neoliberalism-crisis-in-western-politics
Brexit is a classic example of such populism. It has overturned a fundamental cornerstone of UK policy since the early 1970s. Though ostensibly about Europe, it was in fact about much more: a cri de coeur from those who feel they have lost out and been left behind, whose living standards have stagnated or worse since the 1980s, who feel dislocated by large-scale immigration over which they have no control and who face an increasingly insecure and casualised labour market. Their revolt has paralysed the governing elite, already claimed one prime minister, and left the latest one fumbling around in the dark looking for divine inspiration.
The re-emergence of class should not be confused with the labour movement. They are not synonymous: this is obvious in the US and increasingly the case in the UK. Indeed, over the last half-century, there has been a growing separation between the two in Britain. The re-emergence of the working class as a political voice in Britain, most notably in the Brexit vote, can best be described as an inchoate expression of resentment and protest, with only a very weak sense of belonging to the labour movement.
Just as the Labour party took far too long to come to terms with the rise of Thatcherism and the birth of a new era at the end of the 70s, now it could not grasp that the Thatcherite paradigm, which they eventually came to embrace in the form of New Labour, had finally run its course. Labour, like everyone else, is obliged to think anew. The membership in their antipathy to New Labour turned to someone who had never accepted the latter, who was the polar opposite in almost every respect of Blair, and embodying an authenticity and decency which Blair patently did not.
Corbyn is not a product of the new times, he is a throwback to the late 70s and early 80s. That is both his strength and also his weakness. He is uncontaminated by the New Labour legacy because he has never accepted it. But nor, it would seem, does he understand the nature of the new era. The danger is that he is possessed of feet of clay in what is a highly fluid and unpredictable political environment, devoid of any certainties of almost any kind, in which Labour finds itself dangerously divided and weakened.
Labour may be in intensive care, but the condition of the Conservatives is not a great deal better.
The reasons are not difficult to explain. The hyper-globalisation era has been systematically stacked in favour of capital against labour: international trading agreements, drawn up in great secrecy, with business on the inside and the unions and citizens excluded, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being but the latest examples; the politico-legal attack on the unions; the encouragement of large-scale immigration in both the US and Europe that helped to undermine the bargaining power of the domestic workforce; and the failure to retrain displaced workers in any meaningful way.
more
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...h-of-neoliberalism-crisis-in-western-politics
How many of the immigrant filth from the EU in Britain is actually qualified and skilled?
With the EU's racist immigration policy, which states that unskilled EU immigrants must take priority over skilled immigrants from the Commonwealth like doctors and lawyers, I'd say very few of them are.
The Labour Party was founded by the Scotsman Keir Hardie in 1900 to represent the working class. Hardie was the party's first leader and first MP.
For decades it was the voice of the working class and was dominated by working class MPs, but in recent years it (like many other things) has been taken over by a cabal of posh, far-left, metropolitan, sneering North London types who detest the white working class and ignore their concerns.
The EU referendum result shows how out of touch Labour now is. Most Labour voters voted to Leave the EU yet most Labour MPs are Remainers. Therefore they don't represent their constituents. In the Labour leadership contest we have Smith even saying that should he become leader (which is not going to happen) he will give a second EU referendum if he wins the 2020 election. So we would have the absurd sight of a Labour politician trying to win votes from the electorate by promising that he will ignore the electorate's wishes if he becomes PM by holding a second EU referendum!
Theresa May is going to win the 7th May 2020 election in a landslide - especially after she delivers Brexit well - and the Labour Party are doomed to split, to become two separate parties
Gary Fooks, Karen West and Kevin Farnsworth trace the ballooning of executive pay to a concerted effort to transfer income from other workers to the executive class in the UK.
During her leadership campaign for prime minister, Theresa May described the gap between boardroom and worker pay as “irrational, unhealthy and growing”. Her call for listed companies to publish the ratio between CEO and average worker pay reflected concerns across the political spectrum that the pay gap between rich and poor has become unsustainably wide.
Between 1949 and 1979, the share of income going to the top 0.1% of earners actually fell from 3.5% to 1.3%. But since then the trend has reversed. Pay differentials between CEOs and their employees provide a vivid illustration of this. According to the High Pay Centre, the average FTSE 100 CEO was paid 47 times more than the average employee in 1998 – by 2015 this had risen to 129 times.
The growing pay gap in UK companies takes effect against an unprecedented decline in average workers’ real wages, which have fallen by around 8-10% since 2008. It is the stagnant wages of ordinary workers in the UK that has led to high rates of pay in the corporate sector assuming greater political significance.
If wage differentials continue along their current trajectory, the UK will have returned to Victorian levels of income inequality by 2030.
The key question, however, is how did we get here?
Explanations for the inequality in pay must take account of both structural issues, such as the reduced influence of collective bargaining, which explain poor wage growth for average workers, and the various drivers of inflation-busting increases for high-earning executives.
In 1982, senior officers from major UK-based companies, including Boots, the Beecham Group (now part of GlaxoSmithKline), Rio Tinto and Unilever, came together at Imperial Chemicals House to discuss boardroom pay.
The Chairman’s Club, as it was described in one document, had convened at the request of Sir John Harvey-Jones, then chair of Imperial Chemicals Industries.
The minutes of its first meeting indicate that those present unanimously agreed that the remuneration of executive directors and senior management in the UK was “too low on any international comparison” and that most felt that this “was not rational nor acceptable”.
The consensus was that there was “a need for a cohesive drive on [the] issue”, despite the obvious political difficulties involved in driving up the pay of top management while “trying to persuade employees at large to accept moderate pay settlements”.
more
https://theconversation.com/the-murky-politics-of-boardroom-pay-63685
During her leadership campaign for prime minister, Theresa May described the gap between boardroom and worker pay as “irrational, unhealthy and growing”. Her call for listed companies to publish the ratio between CEO and average worker pay reflected concerns across the political spectrum that the pay gap between rich and poor has become unsustainably wide.
Between 1949 and 1979, the share of income going to the top 0.1% of earners actually fell from 3.5% to 1.3%. But since then the trend has reversed. Pay differentials between CEOs and their employees provide a vivid illustration of this. According to the High Pay Centre, the average FTSE 100 CEO was paid 47 times more than the average employee in 1998 – by 2015 this had risen to 129 times.
The growing pay gap in UK companies takes effect against an unprecedented decline in average workers’ real wages, which have fallen by around 8-10% since 2008. It is the stagnant wages of ordinary workers in the UK that has led to high rates of pay in the corporate sector assuming greater political significance.
If wage differentials continue along their current trajectory, the UK will have returned to Victorian levels of income inequality by 2030.
The key question, however, is how did we get here?
Explanations for the inequality in pay must take account of both structural issues, such as the reduced influence of collective bargaining, which explain poor wage growth for average workers, and the various drivers of inflation-busting increases for high-earning executives.
In 1982, senior officers from major UK-based companies, including Boots, the Beecham Group (now part of GlaxoSmithKline), Rio Tinto and Unilever, came together at Imperial Chemicals House to discuss boardroom pay.
The Chairman’s Club, as it was described in one document, had convened at the request of Sir John Harvey-Jones, then chair of Imperial Chemicals Industries.
The minutes of its first meeting indicate that those present unanimously agreed that the remuneration of executive directors and senior management in the UK was “too low on any international comparison” and that most felt that this “was not rational nor acceptable”.
The consensus was that there was “a need for a cohesive drive on [the] issue”, despite the obvious political difficulties involved in driving up the pay of top management while “trying to persuade employees at large to accept moderate pay settlements”.
more
https://theconversation.com/the-murky-politics-of-boardroom-pay-63685
I've been reading drivel like this for the last fifty years. It hasn't happened yet and given the more tolerant attitudes of most Canadians I don't expect it to happen.
Speaking of immigrants, I noticed this week that our local Costco has lambs in the cooler now. With a sign that they are Halal.
I'm guessing you can also find Kosher food there as well as Ukrainian, Italian, Chinese, German, East Indian, Thai, and... well, you should get the picture.