Some Labour supporters prefer being in opposition.
That's not really the choice being presented here though is it. What's being presented is a choice between being in power, on the condition of aping the Conservatives, or being frozen out of executive office and clinging onto the party's principles.
I reject that completely as a false dichotomy. The old consensus always ends eventually and is surpassed by a new one. Labour has won on a left platform before, and it can win on a left platform again – albeit maybe not in 2020.
Well then forgive me as I invoke the realpolitik; why on earth should the Labour party spend even a fraction of a second listening to you if you have no intention whatsoever of voting for them and aren't open to persuasion?
I do have to disagree with you that the way to win is preach to the converted though - there simply are not enough hard core left-wing voters to win an election.
I'm not proposing that Labour should preach to the converted. I'm proposing that it should preach to the NOTAs, those who voted Green, those who voted SNP in Scotland etc...
I am also proposing that they shouldn't waste energy preaching to voters who fall into the same bracket as yourself - those who've no intention of voting Labour next time around but also claim to know the best electoral strategy for getting back into power from the "centre-left".
Well then forgive me as I invoke the realpolitik; why on earth should the Labour party spend even a fraction of a second listening to you if you have no intention whatsoever of voting for them and aren't open to persuasion?
I wouldnt dream of expecting the Labour Party to listen to me - had they done so they could easily been in power today.
I'm not proposing that Labour should preach to the converted. I'm proposing that it should preach to the NOTAs, those who voted Green, those who voted SNP in Scotland etc...
I am also proposing that they shouldn't waste energy preaching to voters who fall into the same bracket as yourself - those who've no intention of voting Labour next time around but also claim to know the best electoral strategy for getting back into power from the "centre-left".
OK - if you feel that one last heave to the Left is all thats needed rather than winning on the centre ground of politics - care to illustrate where this strategy has been successful in the past?
Well then forgive me as I invoke the realpolitik; why on earth should the Labour party spend even a fraction of a second listening to you if you have no intention whatsoever of voting for them and aren't open to persuasion?
I'm not proposing that Labour should preach to the converted. I'm proposing that it should preach to the NOTAs, those who voted Green, those who voted SNP in Scotland etc...
I am also proposing that they shouldn't waste energy preaching to voters who fall into the same bracket as yourself - those who've no intention of voting Labour next time around but also claim to know the best electoral strategy for getting back into power from the "centre-left".
There are no hordes of available NOTAs . Its a mirage. The Greens, UKIP and Liberals cover most elements of the electorate not covered by the major parties now . The SNP in Scotland fill the demand there for old style socialism, and add nationalist appeal. The rest of the not voting block is filled by people who don't think its worth voting in a safe seat, or those unable to vote , and the politically illiterate. Corbyns policies are already represented by the far left parties - who got about 50,000 votes between them.
Red Labour offers nothing to a 2015 blue SNP voter . it can't be more Scottish or more socialist, and even if it does, it doesn't take one more Conservative seat. It might attract a few Green protest votes , but an old style stalinist party doesn't have the same views on growth. It might pull in more of a Labour core vote, and unambitious students, by offering bribes of more benefits, and free tuition, but that will put off successful Labour voters - who don't want to pay for them, or see an economic crisis result. It doesn't matter if Labour piles on its core vote in most of its remaining seats - a 100% turnout in Sunderland, or Liverpool, counts for nothing..
Worse, Red Labour offers the Liberals a way back - in votes in Labour seats at least - by being the likeable modern left - not the, looney ,1983 hard left. And, crucially, it allows UKIP to sustain, and build, its vote in Labour seats - which might otherwise decline post referendum. UKIP can point out that Corbyn Labour is the pro Putin, pro Jihaddist, unilateralist, anti-defence, disarming party, and claim the mantle as the patriotic worker's party. It can also get on with portraying labour as the pro immigration, politically correct, pro benefits, high taxes, high defecits, party.
The Conservatives then just have to keep their marginal voters happy - with growth, pay rises, tax cuts, and last minute tax cuts and minimum wage level increases. They can also count the gains from boundary changes in 2018.
And thats the bright view for Labour, because Corbyn would face a majority of MPs and a shadow cabinet, that hasn't been elected on , and doesn't believe in his policies. That just means mayhem. And voters don't vote for party thats split in two, or three, where its own leader's policies are being revealed, as rubbish, by almost every major Labour figure anyone hs heard of.
To be completely honest, I do actually think that the crisis could have been handled better – but, like you say, that's with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. In the interests of fairness I have to admit that it could also have been handled a whole lot worse – and that's a debate for another day.
Indeed.
Also, I had meant to thank you in my reply for starting a thoughtful and enjoyable thread. Jim McIntosh reminded me of this when he thanked you.
I am enjoying this thread very much. Far more than the 'is to/is not' dross that otherwise infests this forum.
Because there's a decision to be made, and we should explore all the possible outcomes and scenarios associated with each option before deciding what the right course of action is.
Pick the right leader, and the way ahead will become clear.
ETA: You can't be my age without wanting to add 'grasshopper' to the end of that sentence.
I wasn't expecting you (or anyone, really) to advocate for a Stalinist cult of personality. People accuse Corbyn of being way to the left, but you're calling for us to emulate the Soviet Union here.
Well not really. I had Thatcher and Blair in mind, rather than Stalin! Never-the-less, both Hitler and Stalin had that mysterious Charisma that had people follow them. Unfortunately for their respective countries, they were both nutjobs who attained absolute power. Fortunately for us, neither Blair or Thatcher had the option of absolute power.
You seem to have implied that I think Labour needs Joseph Stalin, and I suppose that isn't a million miles off the mark. Of course, I have different qualities in mind than the ones Stalin ended up being famous for.
The important point for me in this discussion is not policy, but the nature of successful political leaders.
I'm certainly not suggesting that Labour pursue a policy of starving millions of peasant farmers to death. Or sending disodents to gulags. Although I would definitely read a book titled "One day in the life of John Prescott".
I am saying there are reasons why men like Hitler and Stalin command loyalty, even adoration, when they assume power. And it's not because they were homicidal maniacs. It's because they have a set of personal attributes that attract the rest of us.
And yes, they're the same sort of attributes you find in Blair and Thatcher. But not Miliband. Or Cameron.
I suppose the above will be misunderstood, and then used as a rhetorical weapon to beat me about the head If I'm destined for a gulag, please can be on the Algarve and "All inclusive?"
I wouldn't say easily rattled. I would perhaps agree that he's got a bit of a short fuse – and a sharp temper at the end of it. Still, this will be under control with practice
Maybe. Thing is, he's already a grumpy old man. By the time the election comes around he'll be so old he'll have his own strata. Teams of archeologists will have set up camp and started a dig. And lest you think I'm being unnecessarily flippant, I do so to highlight an issue Corban will face.
Cast your mind back to Menzies Campbell and you'll gain an insight into the sort of treatment Corban can expect. By 2020 he will be older than Campbell was when he lead the Lib Dems. Even journalists are likely to notice, let alone satirists.
I wouldn't disagree with you on that. It echoes the argument from Slavoj Zizek a couple of years ago for a “Thatcher of the left” to come along and do pretty much exactly that – drag the centre ground leftward. Is that Corbyn?
Too soon to say. He doesn't seem to me to have the personality to be that guy. But many people didn't rate Thatcher in 1981 either. She was sitting on a majority of just 30, the polls weren't very comforting, and she faced a real possibility of being a one-term PM. And then along came the Falklands, and a chance for the country to see the stuff of which she was made.
I think it's safe to say that we're unlikely to discover that individual, whoever they turn out to be, by sticking with continuity candidates.
Yes, I agree. Given that highly effective leaders such as Thatcher and Blair are usually polarising figures, it may even be harder for such people to rise to the top of well-established parties such as Labour and the Conservatives.
The ones that do are probably both very good leaders, and very lucky. Corban has certainly had a bit of luck (as did Churchill, Thatcher and Blair). Let's see if he is able to capitalise on it, survive the sour grapes (Labour) and panic (media, business) that will follow, and then move the peg that marks the centre ground of UK politics.
The Labour election seems to have gone beyond the ridiculous stage. There's now reports in the papers, of all political persuasions, that Labour MPs are reporting seeing Militant people that Kinnock got rid of back in the 1990s at meetings nominating Corbyn. 50% of the members seen at some meetings have reportedly never been seen before. There's known TUSC and Green activists turning up and voting. Mass enrollment of Unite members continues . The Communist Party of GB is telling its supporters to turn up and get Corbyn elected. Harman has already been asked to call the whole thing off, because its clear that there's been mass entryism by people from other parties. I don't expect she will have the nerve to act, but, whoever wins the process, is now looking decidedly incredible.
What would be the point of setting up a website to sell cups in a future where everyone can 3D print one themselves? Surely you would be better off setting up a website which traded in cup designs.
Absolutely which is the point - (by the way cups was an example). The design still has value - sell the design and let you manufacture at the point of use (or at least near to it). This has other advantages, not least in that you are not transporting physical goods from the point of manufacture to use. Given the need to reduce carbon emissions (and other green house gases) this is surely a benefit.
Many small goods - such as cups, small replacement parts - will be manufactured in the consumers home at very little cost - larger things would be made in small micro-factories - and that includes cars. Not that you are likely to own a car. With a largely urban population - it makes no sense to own a car which costs thousands to keep on the road and is not used for 90% of the time.
Alternatively – if 3d printers remain prohibitively expensive, then you're still in a scenario where the financial entry barriers are high and those with deep pockets will monopolise 3D printing as a service.
To late - 3d printers are all ready very cheap - I'm building one at the moment which costs approx next to nothing per month to build - even if I decided to buy it already built I'm looking at about £700 - you can get better ones for more money but they are already cheap.
...unless you can 3D print yourself a car or bicycle, in which case the same principles above apply.
Well apart from the above point why own a car? With a largely urbanised population it makes no sense to own an expensive piece of technology that sits rotting on the roadside (and losing value 90% of the time).
There is so much you cannot 3d print now - they have even 3d printed a working liver.
And who will own those factories? And who, if anyone, will work in them?
Such factories would not be the large ones that dominate industry now but small ones - your cost barrier to entry is low making it practical for people of relatively low means to club together and buy one if they need it - and at the lowest level the consumer will have low scale 3d printers to handle the really
OK – let me rephrase the question. How would I pay the rent in the context you describe? No matter what the employment model is, I'll still have fixed costs that I need to cover simply by virtue of being alive – I will need to have a reasonable expectation of meeting these fixed costs on an ongoing basis. Would your universal basic income cover these costs?
Think about this the largest thing most people buy is a home followed by the car. Now take away the second of those - all those costs now reduced to near nothing. Follow that with the low cost of entry of doing things and you are not in the career and tied to one employer. You work to live (rather than live to work). How much you do is up to you.
Yes I gathered that. I was trying to work out whether you'd ever consider switching sides or whether you're using a circular argument that you won't support the Labour party because they're the Labour party.
Well it would be more accurate to say I'm not a socialist. I don't believe in central planning, state ownership of industry or many of those things supported by socialists. As for the current Labour party - if they were a speak you weight machine I'd ask for a second opinion - much of the current leadership would sell their own grandmothers if there was an extra vote in it. This was brought home to me when campaigning against IR35 - when a supposedly left wing MP told me they were happy employers had a means to avoid employment rights if they (the government) could get some extra tax - and one of the reasons for IR35 - was to help large multinationals - and they were happy for 60,000 SMEs to go to the wall - and end up working for the same large multi-nationals (and their wealthy shareholders). Look up the satire on it that can be found here http://www.dgwsoft.co.uk/crony1.htm. The current Labour Party is not the Party of Kier Hardy.
This doesn't address my question. I didn't ask you what you dislike about the left. I asked whether you'd be prepared to support Labour if they made noises in the direction we've been discussing. Should I assume the answer is no?
Then it would not be the Labour Party would it?
A platform providing services, yes. I'm distinguishing between services and information goods. Both are non-physical, but one can in theory be replicated infinitely – and therefore can't be priced using conventional means (supply vs demand) unless it has intellectual property legislation behind it with a realistic prospect of enforcement. The logical end point of these trends looks like this;
100% automation of manufacturing physical goods
100% automation of logistics
100% automation of infrastructure and maintenance of infrastructure
100% freedom of information goods (where IP law becomes unenforceable)
I seriously doubt we are ever going to get into that situation. However much you automate any process, someone is going to have to tell the automated system what to produce. Such a system leaves our creativity but you cannot automate creativity - and this is where much of the human energy is going to be expanded.
Nobody had 90% of the search market before Google came along. In theory, someone could come along and knock Google off their perch, take that 90% of the search market for themselves. It would still qualify as a monopoly – a monopoly exists independently of who's operating it at a given point in time.
Search was not a fragmented market - Yahoo pretty much cornered it. Monopolies once they get to a certain size move from being innovative to essentially being risk averse and protecting an existing market. That is why eventually all monopolies are replaced. Indeed look at the average time a company is in the Fortune 500 and it has been in decline pretty much since the 1930's.
In my defence, I wasn't claiming that they were the greatest thing ever. I was claiming that they've carved out a monopoly in their sectors of the internet. Do you refute that?
Nope, just pointing out that such a monopoly has a finite life.
As a conservative I would have thought you'd have been pleased to see monopolies broken up? The traditional market-based view of economic conservatism takes a very dim view of monopolies on the basis that they stifle competition.
Of course - but ironically regulation ends up helping such monopolies as the cost of keeping to the regulations makes entering a market prohibitively expensive. Taxis being a classic example. In London a Hackney Cab driver spends years learning the knowledge which becomes less relevant as GPS comes around and tells you what route. The way in some jurisdictions insurance makes it illegal to use your car for commercial reasons also prohibits new entrants.
With respect, you've followed up your initial vague soundbyte with a second vague soundbyte. What do you actually mean by “helping them take what they have – and making something of it”? What specific actions would that entail?
First and foremost is education. Not of the name the Kings and Queens of England but stop telling people they cannot do something because of money, disability lack of educational attainment - pretty much everyone has interests, problems and the like - this is where the opportunities exist.
And what if the person in question has nothing (or very little) to begin with? How do you propose to “make something” of that, in the face of the enormous competitive advantage enjoyed by rival economic agents who are able to command financial and social capital?
But you are still thinking around a model when the barriers to entry are large, requiring large capital injections - when the costs are low then this is not a barrier - in which case the barriers are personal - and also not insurmountable.
That's because you haven't considered what they actually mean in practice. It means that private sector employers shouldn't be able to make someone redundant without paying for the true social cost of making that person unemployed.
Seriously are you saying that to me as a person who was freelance - and represented hundreds for six years.
It means that manufacturers have to factor the cost of cleaning up or mitigating the pollution they generate into the price of their products. It means that the state must act to pour cold water onto any market that's heating up (e.g. the housing market)
Why would anyone have a problem with that - if companies were forced to contribute to cleaning up the rubbish created from their cr*p packaging they might actually reduce it.
– and that those who benefited from the right to buy in the 1980s are also compelled to fund the construction of new social housing to replenish the resources they privatised in the past.
They did that by paying at least a contribution when they pay for the property - which is why councils should be allowed to use that money to build new housing.
It means an effective prohibition on financial wizardry in the city that serves only to increase the speculative value of financial portfolios, on the grounds that society will suffer when the boom inevitably turns to bust. Once you force profit-seeking entities to accept the full social cost of their activities, it becomes very much more difficult to turn a profit.
You don't need to prohibit so much as have a regulator knowledgeable enough to question the wisdom of such actions - something that was clearly missing in the early parts of the century.
Yes. It's a short-hand colloquialism for the idea that (in some circumstances) you're better off refusing certain low-paid work and claiming benefits instead. It's not a literal, physical trap. There's nobody stuck in Epping forest with their leg clamped in the steel-jawed benefits trap screaming “help me!”. In reality, the “benefits trap” is an indictment of the fact that the bottom rung of the “legitimate” employment ladder is now submerged below the base level that the state determines to be the absolute minimum. The presence of welfare isn't a constraint in the sense I was asking you about. There's nothing physically stopping someone from choosing to accept whatever paid work they can find, even if it pays below the level that they would otherwise receive from the state – and in that sense “the benefit trap” is a manifestation of simple common sense. Why would we expect someone to take a decision which leaves them materially worse off?
I think I said that but ask the single mother who finds going out to work actually costs because of child care which is why she does not. We really need a system which ensures that going out to work makes you money.
There's a simple choice to be made. You could take the state benefit away, and force the person to either take whatever work they can find at a lower income than they would have received previously, or starve. Or you could force employers, through legislation, to pay a liveable wage above the statutory minimum in the first instance. Both are valid ways out of the “trap” - although I know which I prefer.
I think we can agree that employers should pay sufficient to ensure that people have enough to live on - employers have for too long relied on the benefit system to prop up poor wages.
But look again at a system where you are not in the traditional employer/employee relationship, work can fit in with life requirements rather than the other way around. (see http://www.peersincorporated.com/)
While this article raises a number of interesting case studies, it does not explicitly put forward a hypothesis or mechanism whereby a scheme of this nature would be defined as “self funding”. It highlights the obvious point that the less poverty there is, the less resource society has to expend ameliorating its negative effects. That's a given. But you cannot credibly base such an assumption on the experience of 13 homeless people in London, or the brief experience of a small Canadian town 45 years ago.
Why not?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to tear this idea down. I want to find a way of making it work because I think it could become increasingly important in future as an antidote to the changing economic conditions we've discussed earlier, with regular paid employment being harder to come by. Convincing enough people to make this politically viable will require much more compelling argument and evidence than that.
People said the same when we moved from a largely agrarian economy where 98% of the population worked on the land to where we are now and 2% work on the land.
Not only that unless we start to acknowledge that change is going to happen and unless we manage that transition we are going to end up the losers and not benefit. Trying to force it within the framework of a centralised system designed for centralised large manufacturing is just not going to wok.
The Labour election seems to have gone beyond the ridiculous stage. There's now reports in the papers, of all political persuasions, that Labour MPs are reporting seeing Militant people that Kinnock got rid of back in the 1990s at meetings nominating Corbyn. 50% of the members seen at some meetings have reportedly never been seen before. There's known TUSC and Green activists turning up and voting. Mass enrollment of Unite members continues . The Communist Party of GB is telling its supporters to turn up and get Corbyn elected. Harman has already been asked to call the whole thing off, because its clear that there's been mass entryism by people from other parties. I don't expect she will have the nerve to act, but, whoever wins the process, is now looking decidedly incredible.
Yep.. all sorts of things are being made up... do you know some people on forums are making bizarre potentially libelous suggestions that he wouldn't pass a security check... ridiculous doesn;t even describe it.
I wouldnt dream of expecting the Labour Party to listen to me - had they done so they could easily been in power today.
Like I said earlier, winning is the third most important thing in politics. Given a straight choice between adopting a load of crap I know to be false in order to win, or losing as a result of upholding what I know to be correct, I'd consciously, willingly, choose to lose. In American political terms, I'd “rather be right than be president”. Why? Because when the other candidate (the one who does swallow the guff, or believes the guff in the first place) eventually and inevitably fails – I can point and laugh and say “I told you so”. Being right is more important than winning.
OK - if you feel that one last heave to the Left is all thats needed rather than winning on the centre ground of politics - care to illustrate where this strategy has been successful in the past?
Certainly. Let's start with last year, in Scotland, for the SNP. And then there's all those other Labour victories I mentioned earlier – I think it was 1945, 1950, 1964, 1966 and 1974, when Labour won from an explicitly left platform. Plenty of examples internationally too, but there's no need to muddy the waters when there's plenty of domestic examples.
The reason I advocate an abandonment of the centre ground – which I acknowledge would be considered suicidal according to the post 1979 consensus – is because I foresee the crumbling of that same centre ground (and the consensus built upon it) in the near future of British politics. The bulk of the “centre” that Blair managed to persuade to back him in 1997 have spent the last 18 years moving slowly but steadily rightward – and I think that trend is accelerating. I don't think the Labour party has any future if it just blindly tries to follow them down that rabbit-hole. The role of a political party, and particularly of the leader of that party, is to convince other people that they're right – not to start from the position that the public never changes its mind and isn't open to rational argument. Where does that road even lead? Maybe to a kind of political system that resembles America, with Labour being very much more like the Democrats under Clinton; economically right wing (to the right of our Conservative party) but moderately socially liberal. Largely, the Conservatives are already occupying that space – they passed the gay marriage legislation after all. I don't think that kind of politics will work for the left or centre-left in Britain – there are too many people out there who're keen to see systemic change, including change to the economic system of this country, to re-organise things along fairer lines. British political philosophy is not based exclusively on individualism – unlike America there is a deep-rooted collectivist streak within it that advocates systemic change rather than “revolutions of the self”. We're seeing that same impulse manifest itself now in a slightly different way amongst the young. They're not organising themselves into traditional-style trade unions; these kind of structures from the past offer little in the way of practical help to the graduate without a future on a zero hours contract. What they are doing however is acting collectively by organising new forms of protest via the network technology in their pockets.
There are 15 million people registered to vote in Britain who decided not to cast a ballot in 2015. That outstrips the 11 million who voted for the Conservatives.
The Greens, UKIP and Liberals cover most elements of the electorate not covered by the major parties now
Although, presumably these parties didn't do enough to attract the votes of those 15 million NOTAs. It could well be that minor-party-syndrome – a side-effect of FPTP – prevents these parties from attracting significant support. I am naturally inclined towards the kind of politics that the Green party espouses, but I didn't vote for them because of that exact reason. Even when a party like UKIP does come along and attract 3.8 million votes (12.7% of all votes cast), it receives precisely 1 seat from 650. The perceived political landscape of this country is shaped enormously by the quirks of the outdated electoral system. If executive power were apportioned by actual popular vote rather than counting up geographical seats as a proxy for implied support, the electoral map of this country would look very different indeed. As it stands we on the left have to find a way of getting our voice heard (and ultimately to win elections) within the current system – without compromising those beliefs that we hold to be foundational.
I honestly believe that Labour's refusal to hold a referendum on changing the electoral system from FPTP to PR – even though it was explicitly included in the 1997 manifesto – will be seen in the coming decades as one of the Blair government's biggest strategic blunders. In the short term it's obvious why they didn't press for it – why on earth would a party that's just won a landslide want to unpick the very means of attaining victory that had just served them so well? Things tend to move in cycles – what worked so well for them in the past now holds them back in equal measure.
Corbyns policies are already represented by the far left parties - who got about 50,000 votes between them.
I don't think that's an accurate assessment of what Corbyn's campaign actually represents. Go and have a look at what he's actually proposing – it's not exactly Soviet-style forced collectivisation. These aren't the crazed suggestions of those smaller fringe groups who've fallen off the ledge of sanity at the extreme left (i.e. the point where the extreme left looks very much like the extreme right). It is important to remember that Jeremy Corbyn is part of the far left on a scale that's bounded by the outer wings of the Labour party.
Red Labour offers nothing to a 2015 blue SNP voter . it can't be more Scottish or more socialist
More Scottish I'll grant you is not possible. More socialist I would argue is achievable; albeit harder since Nicola Sturgeon has taken over from Alex Salmond. Many pointed out during the referendum and the general election that the cornerstone of the post-independent economic plan put forward by the SNP was to cut corporation tax – again, not exactly the stuff of the hard left.
I'd like to think that Labour under Corbyn could be something of a healing force, patching up a fair number of big cracks that have appeared between Scotland and England over the last couple of decades by offering an alternative vision for society that can be shared by both nations. I may even go so far to say that Labour's performance in Scotland in 2020 will be the primary indicator as to whether Scotland has effectively separated itself from the rest of the country politically, much like Northern Ireland, or whether some kind of new accommodation or consensus can be reached. The SNP will inevitably slip up – there's no way they'll maintain the complete dominance over Scottish politics in the longer term.
but that will put off successful Labour voters - who don't want to pay for them
If “successful” Labour voters can't accept the basic principle that we need to pool a proportion of society's resources in order to prepare the next generation and look after the previous one, then they're in the wrong party. The Conservatives are the correct party for those who're prepared to prioritise personal acquisition of wealth at the expense of society's future and the common good. The only voices carping in favour of student tuition fees on the Labour side are the tribalistic acolytes and apparatchiks of Blair who can't accept that anything their dear leader did may not have worked out all that well.
a 100% turnout in Sunderland, or Liverpool, counts for nothing
There are such things as marginal seats. It is possible for Labour to win marginal seats, on a leftist platform, outside the big cities of the north, if they increase their overall turnout by enthusing the disenchanted and the young. Yes, they'll probably add to their majorities in safe seats as well during the process, but as you say votes piled up in safe seats don't affect the result. Analysis from a while back suggested that there are approximately 10,000 swing households in marginal seats which actually decide elections in this country. How many of those do you think also include people in their 20's and 30's who can't get on the property ladder and afford an independent life of their own? Quite a few I'd wager.
I doubt that very much. I think it'll be another generation before they're a noteworthy political force again. I say this because the bulk of people they angered by u-turning on tuition fees were young – I can't see them rushing to rejoin the iffy Orange-bookers any time soon – if anything, this group probably a sizeable chunk of Corbyn's current base. I think the hardcore Liberal vote is pretty much what we saw at the 2015 poll – i.e. those who subscribe to the classical philosophies of the old Liberal party and also those who're old enough to have been SDP defectors.
Like I said earlier, winning is the third most important thing in politics. Given a straight choice between adopting a load of crap I know to be false in order to win, or losing as a result of upholding what I know to be correct, I'd consciously, willingly, choose to lose. In American political terms, I'd “rather be right than be president”. Why? Because when the other candidate (the one who does swallow the guff, or believes the guff in the first place) eventually and inevitably fails – I can point and laugh and say “I told you so”. Being right is more important than winning.
Well whilst you may believe that the centre ground of politics is a load of crap I would suggest that is where the vast majority of people reside - this belief that there is this untapped groundswell of people just waiting for a Hard Left Party to arrive and sweep them to victory is more hope than fact I'm afraid.
Certainly. Let's start with last year, in Scotland, for the SNP. And then there's all those other Labour victories I mentioned earlier – I think it was 1945, 1950, 1964, 1966 and 1974, when Labour won from an explicitly left platform. Plenty of examples internationally too, but there's no need to muddy the waters when there's plenty of domestic examples.
Well I would suggest that the rise of the SNP has more to do with the specific internal policies of Scotland rather than some desire for a far left Government (which the SNP are not by the way)
The role of a political party, and particularly of the leader of that party, is to convince other people that they're right – not to start from the position that the public never changes its mind and isn't open to rational argument. Where does that road even lead? Maybe to a kind of political system that resembles America, with Labour being very much more like the Democrats under Clinton; economically right wing (to the right of our Conservative party) but moderately socially liberal.
There is no point preaching to the converted and simply ignoring the views of the majority - that is simply university politics and has no relevance to the real world. Yes, you can try and lead people in a certain direction but you all have to be starting at the same place.
British political philosophy is not based exclusively on individualism – unlike America there is a deep-rooted collectivist streak within it that advocates systemic change rather than “revolutions of the self”. We're seeing that same impulse manifest itself now in a slightly different way amongst the young. They're not organising themselves into traditional-style trade unions; these kind of structures from the past offer little in the way of practical help to the graduate without a future on a zero hours contract. What they are doing however is acting collectively by organising new forms of protest via the network technology in their pockets.
The trouble with relying on new types of social media (as Labour found at the election) is that you simply end up talking to like minded people and get sucked into the idea that your views/policies have a lot more support than they actually do.
I'd like to think that Labour under Corbyn could be something of a healing force, patching up a fair number of big cracks that have appeared between Scotland and England over the last couple of decades by offering an alternative vision for society that can be shared by both nations. I may even go so far to say that Labour's performance in Scotland in 2020 will be the primary indicator as to whether Scotland has effectively separated itself from the rest of the country politically, much like Northern Ireland, or whether some kind of new accommodation or consensus can be reached. The SNP will inevitably slip up – there's no way they'll maintain the complete dominance over Scottish politics in the longer term.
I cut this for length but I agree that Corbyn would not lead (or govern if it ever got to that) as a hard left politician - at least not by my reckoning. To me you only enter the hard left when you get to the stage where the public sector far outstrips the private sector, then you can go further and take control of all industry and either become an authoritarian state or devolve power down as far as it will go and become a pure communist state in the purist Marx sense. Everything short of that is left of centre ground which is where Corbyn would put Labour. I imagine he'd renationalise the railways, have more government control in banking and possibly health, but I don't think he would come in and rip up everything and start from a new position. He would move us left but I don't think he could take us that far even if given the opportunity and I don't think he would want to anyway. I don't think we're that revolutionary.
Corporation tax being lowered is not the standard move of a far-left party. It's obviously a plan to grow the economy by encouraging further foreign investment. It's the kind of measure countries take to better their immediate economic outlook. The UK itself has done a bit of that in recent years. We're at 19% and 30% I think, depending on business profits, and I'm sure I heard the US were at 40% right now. I'm left of centre so I'm not keen on persisting with a low corporation tax but I can see why it would be used as a lever at times when foreign investment is deemed necessary. It's the kind of tax that is easily adjusted through peaks and troughs to try to keep business as stable as possible.
I don't think SNP are hard left either. The majority of their supporters and politicians appear to me to be left-leaning centrists. Obviously there are all types as you don't gain that many members and voters without having some diversity but most I know tend to centre left ideas and arguments. I think in government they'd be considered a central party, not dissimilar to Labour (or probably a better comparison would be the kind of central or centre-left parties that often contend in countries like Germany and Sweden), as they would have to make some choices. The independence equation only has appeal if they can grow the economy (as I think they could).
Of the 4 possible leaders Corbyn is the only one I know who has any appeal in Scotland (very recent appeal but appeal none the less). How he will go In England and Wales I'm not sure - I suspect different things are popular between (eg) Scotland and the South East and when it comes down to it there are more votes for Labour to be had in chasing the South East votes (unless they can actually politicise the urban North to a greater degree). I do think we live in a UK now that is very politically polarised by geography and I'm not sure it's even possible to appeal simultaneously to the average voter from rural Scotland, urban Scotland, rural Wales, urban Wales, the North East, the South West, the Midlands, the South East, London, etc because the average voter in each place is so very different now and has completely different ideas and concerns. Last person to do so might have been Blair, I guess, but Blair's first steps as PM seem like 100 years ago now.
The important point for me in this discussion is not policy, but the nature of successful political leaders.
I think you've got this backwards – I really do. I'm always wary of any argument or proposition that would work “if only we got the right people”. Personally I think policy has to be the driving force. Take the 1945 Labour government – one of the most radical there ever was, undoubtedly. It was led by Clement Attlee; a man so completely and utterly dull he gave John Major a run for his money in terms of sheer dreariness. Braggadocio is no guide to success.
So are a good proportion of the electorate. They may warm more readily to a fellow grumpy old man than a shiny-faced whipper-snapper full of soundbytes and not much else. Corbyn carries an authenticity (and his age is part of it) that Cameron simply cannot muster. However, it is something of a double-edged sword. The oldest person ever to win an election was Gladstone, who was 82 when he won his final election – and 84 when he resigned. Still, Corbyn would be 71, 72 by the time the next election rolls around. It would make him the oldest since Churchill – who won his second term in 1951 when in his late 70s.
But many people didn't rate Thatcher in 1981 either. She was sitting on a majority of just 30, the polls weren't very comforting, and she faced a real possibility of being a one-term PM. And then along came the Falklands, and a chance for the country to see the stuff of which she was made.
A valid point. I don't think it's possible to know someone's innate potential until they're actually put to the test for real. Still – I stick by the assertion in my original post, I don't think Corbyn (or any of the others) will win in 2020. If he wins, I think Corbyn's role will be to bring the Labour party back to it's first principles and set a clear direction of travel for whoever comes afterwards to grab with both hands.
That's because you haven't read all of Churchill's history of WW2
If Churchill or the Tories had a plan to introduce some kind of NHS as part of a plan for post-war Britain, you will have no difficulty in producing a link to some kind of supporting evidence. I await it eagerly.
Given the need to reduce carbon emissions (and other green house gases) this is surely a benefit.
Yes, being able to avoid cargo-based emissions by producing things much closer to where they'll actually be consumed is one potential environmental benefit.
With a largely urban population - it makes no sense to own a car which costs thousands to keep on the road and is not used for 90% of the time.
I would be wary of drawing that conclusion. For a start, I would question the definition of “urban”. I think in practice you need to split this out to distinguish between urban and suburban areas. And also I would very strongly question the assumption that living in an “urban” area automatically means you don't need to travel. I don't think that follows at all. Looking at present population patterns there are a significant number of people who don't live in the same urban location that they work in. Sometimes this is through choice, but increasingly I'd argue that it's part of the wider economic shakedown that is Britain's warped housing market, where wages for a particular locale are insufficient to actually live in that locale, so the only alternative is to live in a cheaper area and commute in.
Yes, you could argue that the future economic model would make the idea of commuting to work seem outdated, but there will always be some base level of need to commute from one urban area to another. There are also a significant number of urban and sub-urban areas in Britain that are notoriously badly served by public transport, and I happen to live in one such area. As such, I couldn't currently participate in the economy of this country without access to a car.
To late - 3d printers are all ready very cheap - I'm building one at the moment which costs approx next to nothing per month to build - even if I decided to buy it already built I'm looking at about £700 - you can get better ones for more money but they are already cheap.
A £700 outlay being “cheap” is a relative term – even if you are buying it in instalments. Believe it or not, there are people out there for whom even that entry point is beyond anything they can hope to meet. We currently have families in this country who have to choose between staying warm and eating food – do you think they could stump up £700, or even £30 a month, for an embryonic 3D printer? (lets face it, the tech is still very much in it's infancy – I couldn't for example, print a ready-to-go replacement gearbox for my car, although I could print a working plastic model of one). Please also remember that there's the pre-requisite of having access to an up-to-date computer to either design the products, or at least connect to the 3D printer and pass it instructions. And let's also remember the cost of having electricity in the first place to power all these devices.
Think about this the largest thing most people buy is a home followed by the car. Now take away the second of those - all those costs now reduced to near nothing.
What planet do you live on? Cars are incredibly cheap compared to houses – you can pick up an old banger for £500 one off outlay. Housing is nowhere near as cheap. My rent isn't going to drop or disappear because 3D printing is now a viable technology. I've still got to live somewhere – and generally speaking that “somewhere” will already be owned by another person who expects me to pay for the privilege. I'll ask you again – how would I pay my £800 per month rent (or mortgage) within the economic model you're proposing?
Well it would be more accurate to say I'm not a socialist. I don't believe in central planning, state ownership of industry or many of those things supported by socialists.
A lot of socialists don't believe in those things either. Your mental image of socialism dates from the 1950s. Common ownership of the means of production does not necessarily mean state ownership of the means of production. There are those who believe in socialism from the ground upwards in a loosely-organised, grass-roots, non-hierarchical way. Think anarchist Spain rather than Stalin's Russia.
It could be. It would be like comparing the Conservatives before and after the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. Political parties can undergo radical transformations.
Nope, just pointing out that such a monopoly has a finite life.
Well there certainly won't be any monopolies when the sun goes supernova. I'm assuming you agree that they can be a problem throughout the period that they do exist?
but ironically regulation ends up helping such monopolies as the cost of keeping to the regulations makes entering a market prohibitively expensive.
There is a genuine problem whereby legislators lazily just assume that a market – irrespective of whether it's a monopoly or not – will simply stay the same forever. There's an inverted example in the energy sector, where the six or seven largest firms are subject to specific legislation which smaller, minor-league participants in the market aren't subject to.
Not of the name the Kings and Queens of England but stop telling people they cannot do something because of money, disability lack of educational attainment
Again, you're still talking in soundbytes – and also, you're telling me what you wouldn't do (“I'd stop telling people...”, rather than what you would do.
Also, there is the legitimate question over barriers to entry which you've not yet addressed – you cannot just assume that £700 or £70 or even £7 is affordable to all. The trajectory I see the economy taking in the future is, as you seemed to agree, one of less predictable, less frequent work. The logical consequence of this is lower overall incomes, and that potentially puts us in a position where smaller difference of income between individuals have an increasingly greater competitive advantage.
Because it means that someone, somewhere, who was previously making a profit on the basis that they didn't have to clean up their crap will now be forced to pay to clean up their crap. It either means like-for-like lower profits for that person – or in extremis that the persons activities are in fact no longer profitable at all (if the cost of clearing up their crap exceeds the profit they were deriving from making it). That person – the one who's now being asked to pay more or take less – is going to have a problem with that. Consider that the people who fit into the category I've just described also tend to be some of society's wealthiest, most economically powerful people and you begin to understand why we don't have laws of this kind already.
They did that by paying at least a contribution when they pay for the property
Not when the price they paid was artificially discounted at the time (anything up to 60% off for houses, or 80% off for flats, depending on how long the tenant had occupied them) – and not when the price that's been paid only makes a partial “contribution” towards a) the true value of the asset that's being sold and b) the long-term social cost of privatising that asset on subsequent generations of people who can't afford a place to live. It also says nothing to the fact that the value of houses rose on average by 8% above inflation every year between the mid 80's and the 2008 crash – so there's a speculative opportunity-cost problem (externality) for society to cope with as well.
The price that was paid at the time comes nowhere near covering those costs – implementing the principles you claim to hold in full means recouping some of that lost communal value from the people who've gained in the intervening years as a result of selling those assets off into private, speculative hands.
You don't need to prohibit so much as have a regulator knowledgeable enough to question the wisdom of such actions - something that was clearly missing in the early parts of the century.
You're assuming an all-knowing regulator – and I think most people would agree that the FCA and FSA are not omniscient, and are unlikely to become so in the near future. You're also missing the core point of wizardry in the city – it's primary purpose was to skirt around the reach of regulators, to render them ineffective by bamboozling them. This is why I never accept an argument based exclusively on “better regulation”. It always fails eventually.
We really need a system which ensures that going out to work makes you money.
Two things;
You still haven't explained why the state is a constraint in this scenario
If we're talking about breaking out of the benefits trap, then you really should have said “going out to work means you earn more money than the state determines as the minimum necessary to stay alive” rather than just “going out to work makes you money”, because you've omitted the relative comparison of the two standards.
I think we can agree that employers should pay sufficient to ensure that people have enough to live on - employers have for too long relied on the benefit system to prop up poor wages.
That's encouraging. So how would you ensure that this happens? Minimum wage or some other mechanism? How do you propose to ensure that employers pay a level sufficiently higher than the state-determined minimum subsistence level?
Seriously? Because not everyone in Britain is a homeless person and not everyone in Britain shares the same socio-economic circumstances as small-town Canadians would have faced over 40 years ago. At this point I'm left wondering how good your understanding of the social sciences is. You do understand that what works for Group A might not work for Group B don't you? There is supposed to be a control group in studies of this kind, if they're considered credible. A sample size of 13 isn't really large enough to extrapolate findings across an entire society... Any of this ring a bell?
Well whilst you may believe that the centre ground of politics is a load of crap I would suggest that is where the vast majority of people reside
If the vast majority of the British electorate occupied the political centre, the Liberal Democrats would be in majority government today, not the Conservatives.
And for the record I didn't equate “a load of crap” with “the centre ground” – that's your interpretation of my statement.
What I meant by “load of crap” are things like compulsory ID cards, 90-day detention without trial, systematic and deliberate persecution of the vulnerable by the state by warping the support mechanisms the state itself is supposed to provide to the vulnerable. Do any of those sound like policies of the centre ground to you? If your answer is yes, then I can only conclude that you have absolutely no idea where the centre of British politics actually lies.
this belief that there is this untapped groundswell of people just waiting for a Hard Left Party to arrive and sweep them to victory is more hope than fact I'm afraid.
We cannot know conclusively what will mobilise the disengaged until they are actually mobilised. All we can know with a reasonable degree of certainty is that none of the mainstream large parties currently seem to have the right stuff to engage this group.
Well I would suggest that the rise of the SNP has more to do with the specific internal policies of Scotland rather than some desire for a far left Government (which the SNP are not by the way)
The SNP's defining message of the 2015 campaign was one of opposition to austerity – not a radical left policy perhaps, but a left one nevertheless. Expansionist, Keynesian economics aren't exactly a policy of the radical left, but they are a good deal further to the left than the current Conservatives are positioning themselves. That distinctiveness helped the SNP virtually clear the board in Scotland.
Also – I notice that you don't contest Labour's victories going back beyond 1974. Labour has at least 5 victories under its belt standing on a platform much further to the left than the lauded 1997 one.
There is no point preaching to the converted and simply ignoring the views of the majority - that is simply university politics and has no relevance to the real world. Yes, you can try and lead people in a certain direction but you all have to be starting at the same place.
Do you accept that it's possible for a politician to change a voter's mind through compelling, convincing argument? If your answer is no, then I struggle to see what value there is in continuing this conversation – because our respective approaches to the question of how politics should be conducted are essentially poles apart.
The trouble with relying on new types of social media (as Labour found at the election) is that you simply end up talking to like minded people and get sucked into the idea that your views/policies have a lot more support than they actually do.
We're not talking about opinion polls here though are we. There is such a thing as an echo-chamber on the internet – the closed communities where people only socialise with like-minded folk, radical opinions can tend to re-enforce each other and potentially spiral into an arms race of who can be “truest” to the ideals of the community (i.e. who dares to be most extreme). That's not what I'm advocating here. I'm not suggesting that Labour should stop talking to people who voted Conservative. I am suggesting that they should stop talking (or arguing with) people who're closed-minded. People who've made up their mind that they're never going to vote Labour again no matter what. Like I said before when I invoked the realpolitik question – what would even be the point of engaging with someone like that? It would just amount to wasted hot air or keystrokes. Concentrate instead on open minded people (not saying that there aren't any open minded Conservatives – although perhaps am saying that there are proportionally fewer of them). It's a basic decision in terms of how a party expends it's limited financial and human resources. Concentrate on those people who might be prepared to support you - don't worry about the ones who never will.
then you can go further and take control of all industry and either become an authoritarian state or devolve power down as far as it will go and become a pure communist state in the purist Marx sense.
Nobody, in the Labour party or outside, is going to accept the idea that signing control of everything over to a state ministry is the answer to all our problems – I'd like to think that we live in a more sceptical, less naïve age than that. Corbyn's not going there – he's not going anywhere near there.
I do think we live in a UK now that is very politically polarised by geography
I would completely agree on that. The three big fault lines running across our society are wealth, age and geography. Increasingly these three are forming a kind of self re-enforcing feedback loop; with the older generations hoarding an increasing proportion of the wealth, the young becoming increasingly impoverished and economically marginalised – all of which is contributing to the increasingly sharp geographical division of the country by age; mainly through the arbitrage of the housing market. The number of functional “communities” in the UK, whereby the relatively poor and relatively wealthy live in close proximity in the same locale across multiple generations, is starting to decrease.
An electoral system based on geographical constituencies potentially accelerates these underlying trends, leading to a very deeply divided divided country.
I would be wary of drawing that conclusion. For a start, I would question the definition of “urban”. I think in practice you need to split this out to distinguish between urban and suburban areas. And also I would very strongly question the assumption that living in an “urban” area automatically means you don't need to travel.
Well if you will not take my word hows about the World Health Organisation
The urban population in 2014 accounted for 54% of the total global population, up from 34% in 1960, and continues to grow. The urban population growth, in absolute numbers, is concentrated in the less developed regions of the world. It is estimated that by 2017, even in less developed countries, a majority of people will be living in urban areas.
Trends
The global urban population is expected to grow approximately 1.84% per year between 2015 and 2020, 1.63% per year between 2020 and 2025, and 1.44% per year between 2025 and 2030.
and I did not say that people would not need to travel - just the need for everyone to own a car. In places where Zip Car the mileage driven by car owners went down drastically.
A £700 outlay being “cheap” is a relative term – even if you are buying it in instalments. Believe it or not, there are people out there for whom even that entry point is beyond anything they can hope to meet.
Granted but then micro-manufacturing is not the only option - India has peer networks which are built around rickshaw drivers - and there position is being improved simply by being part of a larger network. There are even networks built around people sewing.
I'm sure given time I can think of a host of ways which are low cost that people could do, but I also think there is power in networks such as Indigogo and Kickstarter which provide extra finance if required. Look in countries such as Bangladesh and people of incredibly low incomes have taken advantage of loans from funding circles - with a repayment rate of 98% - higher than many traditional banks.
I didn't ask what size they would be, I asked who would own them.
But that becomes relevant if the factory is not a large building with a large assembly line. Sized down to say the size of medium sized garage or even smaller then the cost is low enough for a small business person.
Even if it was large then modern manufacturing supports the possibility of renting it out.
What planet do you live on? Cars are incredibly cheap compared to houses – you can pick up an old banger for £500 one off outlay. Housing is nowhere near as cheap. My rent isn't going to drop or disappear because 3D printing is now a viable technology. I've still got to live somewhere – and generally speaking that “somewhere” will already be owned by another person who expects me to pay for the privilege. I'll ask you again – how would I pay my £800 per month rent (or mortgage) within the economic model you're proposing?
Same as you and the differential is not the point - a car and house are the two most expensive things people buy, but if they do not need to own a car it is a cost that they do not need to face. Further freed fro being an employee a person is free to earn what they want, including enough for rent.
It is also why you need to look at things like a guaranteed income - because outside of the traditional employer/employee relationship things are not exactly easy and gaps or rapid changes in income are to be expected.
I am not making a proposal - just extrapolating from trends which have been going on for decades. Take BMW whose latest factory is also it's smallest, most automated and has the lowest staffing levels.
A lot of socialists don't believe in those things either. Your mental image of socialism dates from the 1950s. Common ownership of the means of production does not necessarily mean state ownership of the means of production. There are those who believe in socialism from the ground upwards in a loosely-organised, grass-roots, non-hierarchical way. Think anarchist Spain rather than Stalin's Russia.
According to some on here that is precisely what socialism is about.
Not necessarily if you incorporate feedback loops that monitor demand.
Whose talking monitoring demand - that is easy. Designing products from scratch that takes a person. Setting up machinery to create it requires a human.
Well there certainly won't be any monopolies when the sun goes supernova. I'm assuming you agree that they can be a problem throughout the period that they do exist?
Of course, which is why we have regulations which are supposed to prevent them - but the point still stands - a company gets to a certain size and it moves away from being innovative - and continues to protect market share. There is even a book about this called 'The Innovators Dilemma'
There's an inverted example in the energy sector, where the six or seven largest firms are subject to specific legislation which smaller, minor-league participants in the market aren't subject to.
I would suggest that is a good idea - real innovation rarely comes from the larger companies - and it is through innovation that real change happens.
Again, you're still talking in soundbytes – and also, you're telling me what you wouldn't do (“I'd stop telling people...”, rather than what you would do.
It comes from a central belief that people are all capable of something - and the thing is to find it - and show how they can make the most of that.
Also, there is the legitimate question over barriers to entry which you've not yet addressed – you cannot just assume that £700 or £70 or even £7 is affordable to all. The trajectory I see the economy taking in the future is, as you seemed to agree, one of less predictable, less frequent work. The logical consequence of this is lower overall incomes, and that potentially puts us in a position where smaller difference of income between individuals have an increasingly greater competitive advantage.
But at what point - unless we are going to have a point where the barrier to entry is essentially zero. There was the case a couple of years ago of the homeless man who ended up selling books - you can't get more lacking in resources than a person with no home. If he can do it what is the excuse others can give?
“Large” is a relative term. Any barriers to entry whatsoever will make some degree of difference, however marginal. It's just a question of degree.
Insurmountable? There is in fact no reason why networks can not make a contribution themselves to help people get started. They could do it in lieu of fees later. It really is down to each of us to mold the society we want.
Because it means that someone, somewhere, who was previously making a profit on the basis that they didn't have to clean up their crap will now be forced to pay to clean up their crap.
it does not need to - take packaging for example. It costs to produce and it costs to get rid of it. Do not have the packing and you have no need for the cost of clear-up.
It either means like-for-like lower profits for that person – or in extremis that the persons activities are in fact no longer profitable at all (if the cost of clearing up their crap exceeds the profit they were deriving from making it). That person – the one who's now being asked to pay more or take less – is going to have a problem with that. Consider that the people who fit into the category I've just described also tend to be some of society's wealthiest, most economically powerful people and you begin to understand why we don't have laws of this kind already.
You're assuming an all-knowing regulator – and I think most people would agree that the FCA and FSA are not omniscient, and are unlikely to become so in the near future. You're also missing the core point of wizardry in the city – it's primary purpose was to skirt around the reach of regulators, to render them ineffective by bamboozling them. This is why I never accept an argument based exclusively on “better regulation”. It always fails eventually.
That's encouraging. So how would you ensure that this happens? Minimum wage or some other mechanism? How do you propose to ensure that employers pay a level sufficiently higher than the state-determined minimum subsistence level?
Well a minimum wage pre-supposes that we are talking about an employer/employee paradigm and that is already breaking down with the rise of the self-employed - already numbering over 4m of Britain's workers. But say we are the first thing is education - properly renumerated workers are also more productive leading to higher profits but the other side is to ween employers off the absurd system that gives people benefits because the employer is not paying them enough and part of that is own to the employer taxes he or she pays - first part of that is to encourage paying at least the living wage - and one way you could do that is reduce employer taxes on those that do.
Seriously? Because not everyone in Britain is a homeless person and not everyone in Britain shares the same socio-economic circumstances as small-town Canadians would have faced over 40 years ago. At this point I'm left wondering how good your understanding of the social sciences is. You do understand that what works for Group A might not work for Group B don't you? There is supposed to be a control group in studies of this kind, if they're considered credible. A sample size of 13 isn't really large enough to extrapolate findings across an entire society... Any of this ring a bell?
I'm not a sociologist, I did economics. But yes seriously and if you look at the various experiments in a basic guaranteed income they do end up paying for themselves in higher overall productivity of the group being tested. Even if it does not we may find a need to modify our tax system. If we are moving to a system of Peer networks then it may need the networks themselves to be taxed to pay for it.
I would suggest you read a couple of books that show how Peer networks and 3d printing is opening up opportunities.
Many of the questions you are asking are referred to in those.
The world is changing and we really need to take advantage. The answers are not to be found in arguments about the disparities in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century.
If the vast majority of the British electorate occupied the political centre, the Liberal Democrats would be in majority government today, not the Conservatives.
Well that would only apply if you didnt think the Conservatives were a centre ground party.
We cannot know conclusively what will mobilise the disengaged until they are actually mobilised. All we can know with a reasonable degree of certainty is that none of the mainstream large parties currently seem to have the right stuff to engage this group.
Well Labour lost support to UKIP in several areas - how is moving to the Left going to motivate those voters to return to the fold?
Also – I notice that you don't contest Labour's victories going back beyond 1974. Labour has at least 5 victories under its belt standing on a platform much further to the left than the lauded 1997 one.
I'm not sure that going back almost 50 years is very constructive - you have to fight elections on the issues of today not what happened at a very different time and in very different circumstances in the past.
Do you accept that it's possible for a politician to change a voter's mind through compelling, convincing argument? If your answer is no, then I struggle to see what value there is in continuing this conversation – because our respective approaches to the question of how politics should be conducted are essentially poles apart.
Of course people can change their minds - but you have to have a somewhat coherent argument to put.
Concentrate on those people who might be prepared to support you - don't worry about the ones who never will.
and as I have said - the floating voters are in the centre ground, not off at the extreme margins.
The global urban population is expected to grow approximately 1.84% per year between 2015 and 2020, 1.63% per year between 2020 and 2025, and 1.44% per year between 2025 and 2030.
and I did not say that people would not need to travel - just the need for everyone to own a car. In places where Zip Car the mileage driven by car owners went down drastically.
If there was a correlation between increasing levels of urbanisation and a reduced need to own a car, I would expect the car-per-head ratio to drop as the urbanisation rate rises. In the UK at least, this is not the case – both the urbanisation rate and the car-per-head ratio are rising.
But that becomes relevant if the factory is not a large building with a large assembly line.
The underlying mathematics of private ownership don't change – although the numbers may flex with scale. The reason I ask who owns them is because, realistically, in a context based on private ownership there will always be a group or strata that owns the micro-factories / advanced 3D printers (and is able to glean an economic advantage from them) – and a group that doesn't own them; or rather cannot afford to own them. Unless of course you're proposing that micro-scale 3D printers will become as ubiquitous as, say, shoes? But that still leaves open the question of the larger scale 3D printing plant required to produce larger, more complex or specialist goods that the standard printers cannot handle. Those, presumably, will still only be accessible to those with deep pockets – or potentially to those who're prepared to pool resources via crowdfunding to acquire such equipment.
There is also the question of who owns and controls the supply of raw material which is a necessary input into the 3D printing process. In the world where every second person owns a 3D printer, the man who can provide the equivalent of the ink cartridges is king.
It is the point if you're making the following claim; “take away the second of those - all those costs now reduced to near nothing ”
I don't know how you've arrived at the conclusion that removing the £500 or £1,000 cost of a car does anything to reduce the £250,000 cost of a house. If you remove the need for me to have a car, then yes, you've removed the need for me to spend £1,000 - and I'm £1,000 better off as a result. Now please explain how the 3D printing revolution will do away with my need for basic shelter so I don't have to pay rent or a mortgage. And also please explain how the bank / landlord won't then take the view that I've got an extra £1,000 in my pocket, and raise the rent / mortgage rate accordingly to take it off me.
Further freed fro being an employee a person is free to earn what they want, including enough for rent.
I can't help but smirk at the way you phrased that. “Free to earn what they want”. Really.
According to Conservative ideology, how is that any different from the present day? Don't people currently have this freedom? What's to stop the Tory MP walking up to the homeless person, leaning down and offering the reassuring words “don't worry, you have the freedom to earn what you want.”?
“Freedom to” is distinct from “ability to” and “opportunity to”. I know you probably meant “work as much or as little as they feel they need to” (or similar), but your choice of wording there was very “let them eat cake”.
It is also why you need to look at things like a guaranteed income - because outside of the traditional employer/employee relationship things are not exactly easy and gaps or rapid changes in income are to be expected.
OK you've restored some sense here – I'll give you credit for that.
Yes and I think that's part of the problem for me. You're espousing aspirations, views and positions – albeit ones that are well informed in terms of the likely changes ahead in the economy – rather than a definitive set of actions that would help prepare society for these changes. It probably doesn't help my understanding of your position that we don't share a basic ideological starting point – we start from opposing positions in fact. I consider myself a socialist, you consider yourself an anti-socialist.
According to some on here that is precisely what socialism is about.
With respect to “some on here”, anyone advocating a return to the old Leninist collectivisations and centralised economic planning of the Soviet Union will get very short shrift from me. Milovan Djilas' work on the failure of the top-down Soviet model to accomplish its stated aims, and the propensity of the old bourgeoisie class to be supplanted by the officials and apparatchiks of the state (a failure on its own terms) is a strong influence on my own thinking.
There was the case a couple of years ago of the homeless man who ended up selling books
The article you link to contains a rather important sentence which may help to explain how this transformation came about: “When he got a council flat, he began trading on eBay.” Doesn't sound like the state was a constraint in this guy's case, does it.
it does not need to - take packaging for example. It costs to produce and it costs to get rid of it. Do not have the packing and you have no need for the cost of clear-up.
At which point, you've put the packaging producer completely out of business instead of just putting a dent in their profits. Most economic growth is built on the promotion of artificially created needs – yes, packaging (in most cases) is one of them.
ween employers off the absurd system that gives people benefits because the employer is not paying them enough and part of that is own to the employer taxes he or she pays - first part of that is to encourage paying at least the living wage - and one way you could do that is reduce employer taxes on those that do.
Or alternatively double the taxes of those that don't. I agree with the principle, but why should the state finances take a hit to reward people for simply doing the right thing?
The world is changing and we really need to take advantage. The answers are not to be found in arguments about the disparities in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century.
Neither are they to be found in a slavish devotion to a free-market ideology that dates back even further to Adam Smith and the 18th Century.
Well Labour lost support to UKIP in several areas - how is moving to the Left going to motivate those voters to return to the fold?
If things in politics worked on a nice, easy to understand, linear scale – people would only defect by degrees from their current party to the nearest one on the ideological spectrum. The fact that people did jump from Labour straight to UKIP kind of makes a mockery of the centre ground thesis. I remember one man being interviewed who said he'd narrowed down his choice at the 2015 election to two parties - “UKIP or the Greens” he said. In conventional political logic, that just doesn't compute.
Labour can win voters back from UKIP if it comes up with a compelling answer to the observation that Nigel Farage loves to repeat at every opportunity – that increased migration, particularly of low-skilled workers – has the effect of dragging down wages within a particular locality to the lowest common denominator, because it's eroded the relative bargaining power of the average job-seeker. I don't disagree with the analysis by the way – there are areas of the country where this clearly has happened, and no amount of argument that begins “but the NHS...” or “but increased GDP...” will cut the mustard with people who're at the raw end of these demographic changes. Labour must build a credible alternative remedy for this problem – either by taking steps to increase the bargaining power of all (including migrants) relative to capital and employers, or take steps to restrict the flow of low-skilled workers in the country – or both. Such answers can be advocated from a left platform but would be unthinkable from a centrist one.
I'm not sure that going back almost 50 years is very constructive - you have to fight elections on the issues of today
It can be constructive if the conditions that we thought we'd eradicated forever are, in fact, returning. I heard an interview with a GP on the radio this morning. The topic of conversation? The return of rickets – and the demonstrable malnutrition of school kids during the summer holidays when school dinners aren't available and their parents cannot afford to feed them properly to fill the gap. Disturbingly these are the kind of problems we experienced 50 or 60 years ago – they are returning. Don't lazily assume progress is a one way street. If the solutions of 50 years ago are finding traction in the society of today, one possible reason may be that the problems of 50 years ago haven't been solved after all.
Of course people can change their minds - but you have to have a somewhat coherent argument to put.
What element of Corbyn's proposed platform is incoherent? I've heard lots of assertions that it's unpopular, or that it would render Labour unelectable – I've yet to hear objections based on the idea that Corbyn can't form coherent sentences or that his ideas are internally inconsistent or contradictory.
I don't think the Conservatives are a centrist party.
Theres your problem.
Labour can win voters back from UKIP if it comes up with a compelling answer to the observation that Nigel Farage loves to repeat at every opportunity – that increased migration, particularly of low-skilled workers – has the effect of dragging down wages within a particular locality to the lowest common denominator, because it's eroded the relative bargaining power of the average job-seeker. I don't disagree with the analysis by the way – there are areas of the country where this clearly has happened, and no amount of argument that begins “but the NHS...” or “but increased GDP...” will cut the mustard with people who're at the raw end of these demographic changes. Labour must build a credible alternative remedy for this problem – either by taking steps to increase the bargaining power of all (including migrants) relative to capital and employers, or take steps to restrict the flow of low-skilled workers in the country – or both. Such answers can be advocated from a left platform but would be unthinkable from a centrist one.
Well increasing the bargaining power (and therefore presumably wages) isnt going to help as it simply makes the UK even more attractive for unskilled workers.
Restricting the flow of workers could work but it would be incompatible with Labours support for membership of the EU (remember Labour didnt even want a referendum on membership). OK Corbyn has history of being a Euroskeptic - is he going to take the rest of the Party with him though?
It can be constructive if the conditions that we thought we'd eradicated forever are, in fact, returning. I heard an interview with a GP on the radio this morning. The topic of conversation? The return of rickets – and the demonstrable malnutrition of school kids during the summer holidays when school dinners aren't available and their parents cannot afford to feed them properly to fill the gap. Disturbingly these are the kind of problems we experienced 50 or 60 years ago – they are returning. Don't lazily assume progress is a one way street. If the solutions of 50 years ago are finding traction in the society of today, one possible reason may be that the problems of 50 years ago haven't been solved after all.
But saying that you can apply 50 year old remedies to problems is just not feasible - the world has changed a lot in 50 years. We have open borders, globalisation, a total change in the economic situation and a completely different social attitude.
What element of Corbyn's proposed platform is incoherent? I've heard lots of assertions that it's unpopular, or that it would render Labour unelectable – I've yet to hear objections based on the idea that Corbyn can't form coherent sentences or that his ideas are internally inconsistent or contradictory.
Well I am more interested in his policy ideas and given that for obvious reasons he is light on detail then you can only go on what he has historically supported. As a for instance, he is an enthusiastic supporter of a regime that hangs people for being Gay - if that is the correct policy for a Left-wing government I would say that is rather incoherent stance.
Restricting the flow of workers could work but it would be incompatible with Labours support for membership of the EU (remember Labour didnt even want a referendum on membership). OK Corbyn has history of being a Euroskeptic - is he going to take the rest of the Party with him though?
Left-euroscepticism I think is about to undergo something of a revival. I get the impression that Corbyn thought long and hard before clarifying his position yesterday as “want to stay in the EU so that we can change it”. He is canny enough to realise that openly beating the drum for Brexit might be a bridge too far at the moment. In the unlikely event that he becomes PM and actually gets the chance to pursue this course of action, I think it will ultimately end in failure. We have witnessed a clear demonstration of what the EU is actually about (or, should I say what Germany is actually about) through its conduct towards Greece. If the British left try to reform from within, they'll fail. Reform from within would require a critical mass demanding radical change which just isn't there at the moment. My personal attitude towards the EU at this point in history is that it cannot be salvaged – and that those of us who consider ourselves pro-European and internationalists in the truest sense of the word will need to build the new Europe on the smashed rubble of the old one, rather than delude ourselves that any kind of meaningful or positive social change will break out from inside the current EU, with a new and better Europe emerging from the old one like a butterfly shedding its chrysalis.
Will the Labour party come around to this view? I don't know – but I would say that the largest determining factor in answering the question will be the conduct of the EU over the next decade or so. Further German intransigence and the pursuit of economic policies that even the IMF admits don't work will be a powerful argument in favour of the stance that the late Bob Crow took. Watch very closely the next time a crisis emerges (it won't be too long – if nothing else they haven't actually solved the Greek problem). Crow argued that no progressive, socially egalitarian political project was possible in today's Europe – he is on the cusp of being proven posthumously correct.
But saying that you can apply 50 year old remedies to problems is just not feasible
Firstly, please point to a single element of Corbyn's platform that fits the criteria of being a “50 year old remedy”...
Secondly, the age of an idea is no guide as to it's validity. The NHS for example pre-dates the time-frame you've cited here and is generally considered one of the country's greatest political (and social) successes – and is something that only a few on the fringe are prepared to consider culling. The old-age pension dates back even further – should we dispense with it just because it pre-dates the first world war? The limited company is an even older idea; can we get rid of those yet?
What matters in the end is whether an idea works or not. You and I will probably argue vociferously over the criteria for defining what success looks like – but then that's what politics is all about. You and I clearly want to live in very different societies.
As a for instance, he is an enthusiastic supporter of a regime that hangs people for being Gay
Within living memory we in Britain lobotomised people for being gay. You cannot expect social tolerance and liberalism to spread across the world if the self-appointed advocates of tolerance and liberalism also turn a blind eye to other injustices – even those perpetrated against groups or societies who are themselves no angels. The faults of the Palestinian authorities doesn't make Israel right. The rule of IS in northern Iraq or the horrific actions of the Assad government in Syria doesn't mean everyone who lives in those places is a moral reprobate or a psychopathic fanatic. One injustice doesn't cancel out another – and if you set the bar as high as you seem to want to, nobody is worth protecting, because all are guilty of something in someone's view. If perfection is the standard, we'll all fail the test.
Personally I think policy has to be the driving force. Take the 1945 Labour government – one of the most radical there ever was, undoubtedly. It was led by Clement Attlee; a man so completely and utterly dull...
And up against no less a personality than Churchill to boot!
Despite that, I'm still not convinced that in 2015 any combination of policies would have overcome the antipathy of the electorate (and some inside the Labour party) towards Miliband.
But on balance, I have warmed to your argument. Policy does matter, and 1945 is an excellent example of a nation voting for something rather than because of someone.
Despite this, Blair and Thatcher show that personality also matters. For Thatcher it took a war to bring it out. Blair always had it.
Having now had the chance to see a bit more of Corbyn, it's clear he will be a polarising figure if he wins. It's still an open question (for me) as to whether he has that political X factor necessary to capture the heart and minds of voters.
ETA: And not just voters in general, but also members of the Labour Party itself. If he can't bring them together as a team, Labour will struggle to convince the rest of us that it's fit for government come 2020.
If he wins, I think Corbyn's role will be to bring the Labour party back to it's first principles and set a clear direction of travel for whoever comes afterwards to grab with both hands.
Well good luck to him. If he doesn't have whatever it is that has people follow a political leader, I doubt he'll manage to achieve that.
Comments
Yes a discussion took place; and the discussion was essentially Labour in favour and the Conservatives opposed.
There wasn't, as far as I'm aware, a Conservative “version” of the NHS planned at all.
That's not really the choice being presented here though is it. What's being presented is a choice between being in power, on the condition of aping the Conservatives, or being frozen out of executive office and clinging onto the party's principles.
I reject that completely as a false dichotomy. The old consensus always ends eventually and is surpassed by a new one. Labour has won on a left platform before, and it can win on a left platform again – albeit maybe not in 2020.
I'm not proposing that Labour should preach to the converted. I'm proposing that it should preach to the NOTAs, those who voted Green, those who voted SNP in Scotland etc...
I am also proposing that they shouldn't waste energy preaching to voters who fall into the same bracket as yourself - those who've no intention of voting Labour next time around but also claim to know the best electoral strategy for getting back into power from the "centre-left".
I wouldnt dream of expecting the Labour Party to listen to me - had they done so they could easily been in power today.
OK - if you feel that one last heave to the Left is all thats needed rather than winning on the centre ground of politics - care to illustrate where this strategy has been successful in the past?
Or will it be different next time?
There are no hordes of available NOTAs . Its a mirage. The Greens, UKIP and Liberals cover most elements of the electorate not covered by the major parties now . The SNP in Scotland fill the demand there for old style socialism, and add nationalist appeal. The rest of the not voting block is filled by people who don't think its worth voting in a safe seat, or those unable to vote , and the politically illiterate. Corbyns policies are already represented by the far left parties - who got about 50,000 votes between them.
Red Labour offers nothing to a 2015 blue SNP voter . it can't be more Scottish or more socialist, and even if it does, it doesn't take one more Conservative seat. It might attract a few Green protest votes , but an old style stalinist party doesn't have the same views on growth. It might pull in more of a Labour core vote, and unambitious students, by offering bribes of more benefits, and free tuition, but that will put off successful Labour voters - who don't want to pay for them, or see an economic crisis result. It doesn't matter if Labour piles on its core vote in most of its remaining seats - a 100% turnout in Sunderland, or Liverpool, counts for nothing..
Worse, Red Labour offers the Liberals a way back - in votes in Labour seats at least - by being the likeable modern left - not the, looney ,1983 hard left. And, crucially, it allows UKIP to sustain, and build, its vote in Labour seats - which might otherwise decline post referendum. UKIP can point out that Corbyn Labour is the pro Putin, pro Jihaddist, unilateralist, anti-defence, disarming party, and claim the mantle as the patriotic worker's party. It can also get on with portraying labour as the pro immigration, politically correct, pro benefits, high taxes, high defecits, party.
The Conservatives then just have to keep their marginal voters happy - with growth, pay rises, tax cuts, and last minute tax cuts and minimum wage level increases. They can also count the gains from boundary changes in 2018.
And thats the bright view for Labour, because Corbyn would face a majority of MPs and a shadow cabinet, that hasn't been elected on , and doesn't believe in his policies. That just means mayhem. And voters don't vote for party thats split in two, or three, where its own leader's policies are being revealed, as rubbish, by almost every major Labour figure anyone hs heard of.
Indeed.
Also, I had meant to thank you in my reply for starting a thoughtful and enjoyable thread. Jim McIntosh reminded me of this when he thanked you.
I am enjoying this thread very much. Far more than the 'is to/is not' dross that otherwise infests this forum.
Pick the right leader, and the way ahead will become clear.
ETA: You can't be my age without wanting to add 'grasshopper' to the end of that sentence.
Well not really. I had Thatcher and Blair in mind, rather than Stalin! Never-the-less, both Hitler and Stalin had that mysterious Charisma that had people follow them. Unfortunately for their respective countries, they were both nutjobs who attained absolute power. Fortunately for us, neither Blair or Thatcher had the option of absolute power.
You seem to have implied that I think Labour needs Joseph Stalin, and I suppose that isn't a million miles off the mark. Of course, I have different qualities in mind than the ones Stalin ended up being famous for.
The important point for me in this discussion is not policy, but the nature of successful political leaders.
I'm certainly not suggesting that Labour pursue a policy of starving millions of peasant farmers to death. Or sending disodents to gulags. Although I would definitely read a book titled "One day in the life of John Prescott".
I am saying there are reasons why men like Hitler and Stalin command loyalty, even adoration, when they assume power. And it's not because they were homicidal maniacs. It's because they have a set of personal attributes that attract the rest of us.
And yes, they're the same sort of attributes you find in Blair and Thatcher. But not Miliband. Or Cameron.
I suppose the above will be misunderstood, and then used as a rhetorical weapon to beat me about the head
Maybe. Thing is, he's already a grumpy old man. By the time the election comes around he'll be so old he'll have his own strata. Teams of archeologists will have set up camp and started a dig. And lest you think I'm being unnecessarily flippant, I do so to highlight an issue Corban will face.
Cast your mind back to Menzies Campbell and you'll gain an insight into the sort of treatment Corban can expect. By 2020 he will be older than Campbell was when he lead the Lib Dems. Even journalists are likely to notice, let alone satirists.
Too soon to say. He doesn't seem to me to have the personality to be that guy. But many people didn't rate Thatcher in 1981 either. She was sitting on a majority of just 30, the polls weren't very comforting, and she faced a real possibility of being a one-term PM. And then along came the Falklands, and a chance for the country to see the stuff of which she was made.
Yes, I agree. Given that highly effective leaders such as Thatcher and Blair are usually polarising figures, it may even be harder for such people to rise to the top of well-established parties such as Labour and the Conservatives.
The ones that do are probably both very good leaders, and very lucky. Corban has certainly had a bit of luck (as did Churchill, Thatcher and Blair). Let's see if he is able to capitalise on it, survive the sour grapes (Labour) and panic (media, business) that will follow, and then move the peg that marks the centre ground of UK politics.
Absolutely which is the point - (by the way cups was an example). The design still has value - sell the design and let you manufacture at the point of use (or at least near to it). This has other advantages, not least in that you are not transporting physical goods from the point of manufacture to use. Given the need to reduce carbon emissions (and other green house gases) this is surely a benefit.
Many small goods - such as cups, small replacement parts - will be manufactured in the consumers home at very little cost - larger things would be made in small micro-factories - and that includes cars. Not that you are likely to own a car. With a largely urban population - it makes no sense to own a car which costs thousands to keep on the road and is not used for 90% of the time.
To late - 3d printers are all ready very cheap - I'm building one at the moment which costs approx next to nothing per month to build - even if I decided to buy it already built I'm looking at about £700 - you can get better ones for more money but they are already cheap.
Well apart from the above point why own a car? With a largely urbanised population it makes no sense to own an expensive piece of technology that sits rotting on the roadside (and losing value 90% of the time).
There is so much you cannot 3d print now - they have even 3d printed a working liver.
Such factories would not be the large ones that dominate industry now but small ones - your cost barrier to entry is low making it practical for people of relatively low means to club together and buy one if they need it - and at the lowest level the consumer will have low scale 3d printers to handle the really
Think about this the largest thing most people buy is a home followed by the car. Now take away the second of those - all those costs now reduced to near nothing. Follow that with the low cost of entry of doing things and you are not in the career and tied to one employer. You work to live (rather than live to work). How much you do is up to you.
Well it would be more accurate to say I'm not a socialist. I don't believe in central planning, state ownership of industry or many of those things supported by socialists. As for the current Labour party - if they were a speak you weight machine I'd ask for a second opinion - much of the current leadership would sell their own grandmothers if there was an extra vote in it. This was brought home to me when campaigning against IR35 - when a supposedly left wing MP told me they were happy employers had a means to avoid employment rights if they (the government) could get some extra tax - and one of the reasons for IR35 - was to help large multinationals - and they were happy for 60,000 SMEs to go to the wall - and end up working for the same large multi-nationals (and their wealthy shareholders). Look up the satire on it that can be found here http://www.dgwsoft.co.uk/crony1.htm. The current Labour Party is not the Party of Kier Hardy.
Then it would not be the Labour Party would it?
I seriously doubt we are ever going to get into that situation. However much you automate any process, someone is going to have to tell the automated system what to produce. Such a system leaves our creativity but you cannot automate creativity - and this is where much of the human energy is going to be expanded.
Search was not a fragmented market - Yahoo pretty much cornered it. Monopolies once they get to a certain size move from being innovative to essentially being risk averse and protecting an existing market. That is why eventually all monopolies are replaced. Indeed look at the average time a company is in the Fortune 500 and it has been in decline pretty much since the 1930's.
Nope, just pointing out that such a monopoly has a finite life.
Of course - but ironically regulation ends up helping such monopolies as the cost of keeping to the regulations makes entering a market prohibitively expensive. Taxis being a classic example. In London a Hackney Cab driver spends years learning the knowledge which becomes less relevant as GPS comes around and tells you what route. The way in some jurisdictions insurance makes it illegal to use your car for commercial reasons also prohibits new entrants.
First and foremost is education. Not of the name the Kings and Queens of England but stop telling people they cannot do something because of money, disability lack of educational attainment - pretty much everyone has interests, problems and the like - this is where the opportunities exist.
But you are still thinking around a model when the barriers to entry are large, requiring large capital injections - when the costs are low then this is not a barrier - in which case the barriers are personal - and also not insurmountable.
Seriously are you saying that to me as a person who was freelance - and represented hundreds for six years.
Why would anyone have a problem with that - if companies were forced to contribute to cleaning up the rubbish created from their cr*p packaging they might actually reduce it.
They did that by paying at least a contribution when they pay for the property - which is why councils should be allowed to use that money to build new housing.
You don't need to prohibit so much as have a regulator knowledgeable enough to question the wisdom of such actions - something that was clearly missing in the early parts of the century.
I think I said that but ask the single mother who finds going out to work actually costs because of child care which is why she does not. We really need a system which ensures that going out to work makes you money.
I think we can agree that employers should pay sufficient to ensure that people have enough to live on - employers have for too long relied on the benefit system to prop up poor wages.
But look again at a system where you are not in the traditional employer/employee relationship, work can fit in with life requirements rather than the other way around. (see http://www.peersincorporated.com/)
Why not?
People said the same when we moved from a largely agrarian economy where 98% of the population worked on the land to where we are now and 2% work on the land.
Not only that unless we start to acknowledge that change is going to happen and unless we manage that transition we are going to end up the losers and not benefit. Trying to force it within the framework of a centralised system designed for centralised large manufacturing is just not going to wok.
Yep.. all sorts of things are being made up... do you know some people on forums are making bizarre potentially libelous suggestions that he wouldn't pass a security check... ridiculous doesn;t even describe it.
Like I said earlier, winning is the third most important thing in politics. Given a straight choice between adopting a load of crap I know to be false in order to win, or losing as a result of upholding what I know to be correct, I'd consciously, willingly, choose to lose. In American political terms, I'd “rather be right than be president”. Why? Because when the other candidate (the one who does swallow the guff, or believes the guff in the first place) eventually and inevitably fails – I can point and laugh and say “I told you so”. Being right is more important than winning.
Certainly. Let's start with last year, in Scotland, for the SNP. And then there's all those other Labour victories I mentioned earlier – I think it was 1945, 1950, 1964, 1966 and 1974, when Labour won from an explicitly left platform. Plenty of examples internationally too, but there's no need to muddy the waters when there's plenty of domestic examples.
The reason I advocate an abandonment of the centre ground – which I acknowledge would be considered suicidal according to the post 1979 consensus – is because I foresee the crumbling of that same centre ground (and the consensus built upon it) in the near future of British politics. The bulk of the “centre” that Blair managed to persuade to back him in 1997 have spent the last 18 years moving slowly but steadily rightward – and I think that trend is accelerating. I don't think the Labour party has any future if it just blindly tries to follow them down that rabbit-hole. The role of a political party, and particularly of the leader of that party, is to convince other people that they're right – not to start from the position that the public never changes its mind and isn't open to rational argument. Where does that road even lead? Maybe to a kind of political system that resembles America, with Labour being very much more like the Democrats under Clinton; economically right wing (to the right of our Conservative party) but moderately socially liberal. Largely, the Conservatives are already occupying that space – they passed the gay marriage legislation after all. I don't think that kind of politics will work for the left or centre-left in Britain – there are too many people out there who're keen to see systemic change, including change to the economic system of this country, to re-organise things along fairer lines. British political philosophy is not based exclusively on individualism – unlike America there is a deep-rooted collectivist streak within it that advocates systemic change rather than “revolutions of the self”. We're seeing that same impulse manifest itself now in a slightly different way amongst the young. They're not organising themselves into traditional-style trade unions; these kind of structures from the past offer little in the way of practical help to the graduate without a future on a zero hours contract. What they are doing however is acting collectively by organising new forms of protest via the network technology in their pockets.
There are 15 million people registered to vote in Britain who decided not to cast a ballot in 2015. That outstrips the 11 million who voted for the Conservatives.
Although, presumably these parties didn't do enough to attract the votes of those 15 million NOTAs. It could well be that minor-party-syndrome – a side-effect of FPTP – prevents these parties from attracting significant support. I am naturally inclined towards the kind of politics that the Green party espouses, but I didn't vote for them because of that exact reason. Even when a party like UKIP does come along and attract 3.8 million votes (12.7% of all votes cast), it receives precisely 1 seat from 650. The perceived political landscape of this country is shaped enormously by the quirks of the outdated electoral system. If executive power were apportioned by actual popular vote rather than counting up geographical seats as a proxy for implied support, the electoral map of this country would look very different indeed. As it stands we on the left have to find a way of getting our voice heard (and ultimately to win elections) within the current system – without compromising those beliefs that we hold to be foundational.
I honestly believe that Labour's refusal to hold a referendum on changing the electoral system from FPTP to PR – even though it was explicitly included in the 1997 manifesto – will be seen in the coming decades as one of the Blair government's biggest strategic blunders. In the short term it's obvious why they didn't press for it – why on earth would a party that's just won a landslide want to unpick the very means of attaining victory that had just served them so well? Things tend to move in cycles – what worked so well for them in the past now holds them back in equal measure.
I don't think that's an accurate assessment of what Corbyn's campaign actually represents. Go and have a look at what he's actually proposing – it's not exactly Soviet-style forced collectivisation. These aren't the crazed suggestions of those smaller fringe groups who've fallen off the ledge of sanity at the extreme left (i.e. the point where the extreme left looks very much like the extreme right). It is important to remember that Jeremy Corbyn is part of the far left on a scale that's bounded by the outer wings of the Labour party.
More Scottish I'll grant you is not possible. More socialist I would argue is achievable; albeit harder since Nicola Sturgeon has taken over from Alex Salmond. Many pointed out during the referendum and the general election that the cornerstone of the post-independent economic plan put forward by the SNP was to cut corporation tax – again, not exactly the stuff of the hard left.
I'd like to think that Labour under Corbyn could be something of a healing force, patching up a fair number of big cracks that have appeared between Scotland and England over the last couple of decades by offering an alternative vision for society that can be shared by both nations. I may even go so far to say that Labour's performance in Scotland in 2020 will be the primary indicator as to whether Scotland has effectively separated itself from the rest of the country politically, much like Northern Ireland, or whether some kind of new accommodation or consensus can be reached. The SNP will inevitably slip up – there's no way they'll maintain the complete dominance over Scottish politics in the longer term.
If “successful” Labour voters can't accept the basic principle that we need to pool a proportion of society's resources in order to prepare the next generation and look after the previous one, then they're in the wrong party. The Conservatives are the correct party for those who're prepared to prioritise personal acquisition of wealth at the expense of society's future and the common good. The only voices carping in favour of student tuition fees on the Labour side are the tribalistic acolytes and apparatchiks of Blair who can't accept that anything their dear leader did may not have worked out all that well.
There are such things as marginal seats. It is possible for Labour to win marginal seats, on a leftist platform, outside the big cities of the north, if they increase their overall turnout by enthusing the disenchanted and the young. Yes, they'll probably add to their majorities in safe seats as well during the process, but as you say votes piled up in safe seats don't affect the result. Analysis from a while back suggested that there are approximately 10,000 swing households in marginal seats which actually decide elections in this country. How many of those do you think also include people in their 20's and 30's who can't get on the property ladder and afford an independent life of their own? Quite a few I'd wager.
I doubt that very much. I think it'll be another generation before they're a noteworthy political force again. I say this because the bulk of people they angered by u-turning on tuition fees were young – I can't see them rushing to rejoin the iffy Orange-bookers any time soon – if anything, this group probably a sizeable chunk of Corbyn's current base. I think the hardcore Liberal vote is pretty much what we saw at the 2015 poll – i.e. those who subscribe to the classical philosophies of the old Liberal party and also those who're old enough to have been SDP defectors.
Well whilst you may believe that the centre ground of politics is a load of crap I would suggest that is where the vast majority of people reside - this belief that there is this untapped groundswell of people just waiting for a Hard Left Party to arrive and sweep them to victory is more hope than fact I'm afraid.
Well I would suggest that the rise of the SNP has more to do with the specific internal policies of Scotland rather than some desire for a far left Government (which the SNP are not by the way)
There is no point preaching to the converted and simply ignoring the views of the majority - that is simply university politics and has no relevance to the real world. Yes, you can try and lead people in a certain direction but you all have to be starting at the same place.
The trouble with relying on new types of social media (as Labour found at the election) is that you simply end up talking to like minded people and get sucked into the idea that your views/policies have a lot more support than they actually do.
I cut this for length but I agree that Corbyn would not lead (or govern if it ever got to that) as a hard left politician - at least not by my reckoning. To me you only enter the hard left when you get to the stage where the public sector far outstrips the private sector, then you can go further and take control of all industry and either become an authoritarian state or devolve power down as far as it will go and become a pure communist state in the purist Marx sense. Everything short of that is left of centre ground which is where Corbyn would put Labour. I imagine he'd renationalise the railways, have more government control in banking and possibly health, but I don't think he would come in and rip up everything and start from a new position. He would move us left but I don't think he could take us that far even if given the opportunity and I don't think he would want to anyway. I don't think we're that revolutionary.
Corporation tax being lowered is not the standard move of a far-left party. It's obviously a plan to grow the economy by encouraging further foreign investment. It's the kind of measure countries take to better their immediate economic outlook. The UK itself has done a bit of that in recent years. We're at 19% and 30% I think, depending on business profits, and I'm sure I heard the US were at 40% right now. I'm left of centre so I'm not keen on persisting with a low corporation tax but I can see why it would be used as a lever at times when foreign investment is deemed necessary. It's the kind of tax that is easily adjusted through peaks and troughs to try to keep business as stable as possible.
I don't think SNP are hard left either. The majority of their supporters and politicians appear to me to be left-leaning centrists. Obviously there are all types as you don't gain that many members and voters without having some diversity but most I know tend to centre left ideas and arguments. I think in government they'd be considered a central party, not dissimilar to Labour (or probably a better comparison would be the kind of central or centre-left parties that often contend in countries like Germany and Sweden), as they would have to make some choices. The independence equation only has appeal if they can grow the economy (as I think they could).
Of the 4 possible leaders Corbyn is the only one I know who has any appeal in Scotland (very recent appeal but appeal none the less). How he will go In England and Wales I'm not sure - I suspect different things are popular between (eg) Scotland and the South East and when it comes down to it there are more votes for Labour to be had in chasing the South East votes (unless they can actually politicise the urban North to a greater degree). I do think we live in a UK now that is very politically polarised by geography and I'm not sure it's even possible to appeal simultaneously to the average voter from rural Scotland, urban Scotland, rural Wales, urban Wales, the North East, the South West, the Midlands, the South East, London, etc because the average voter in each place is so very different now and has completely different ideas and concerns. Last person to do so might have been Blair, I guess, but Blair's first steps as PM seem like 100 years ago now.
Begs the question; what happens if you choose the wrong one?
I think you've got this backwards – I really do. I'm always wary of any argument or proposition that would work “if only we got the right people”. Personally I think policy has to be the driving force. Take the 1945 Labour government – one of the most radical there ever was, undoubtedly. It was led by Clement Attlee; a man so completely and utterly dull he gave John Major a run for his money in terms of sheer dreariness. Braggadocio is no guide to success.
I dare say it will!
So are a good proportion of the electorate. They may warm more readily to a fellow grumpy old man than a shiny-faced whipper-snapper full of soundbytes and not much else. Corbyn carries an authenticity (and his age is part of it) that Cameron simply cannot muster. However, it is something of a double-edged sword. The oldest person ever to win an election was Gladstone, who was 82 when he won his final election – and 84 when he resigned. Still, Corbyn would be 71, 72 by the time the next election rolls around. It would make him the oldest since Churchill – who won his second term in 1951 when in his late 70s.
A valid point. I don't think it's possible to know someone's innate potential until they're actually put to the test for real. Still – I stick by the assertion in my original post, I don't think Corbyn (or any of the others) will win in 2020. If he wins, I think Corbyn's role will be to bring the Labour party back to it's first principles and set a clear direction of travel for whoever comes afterwards to grab with both hands.
Yes, being able to avoid cargo-based emissions by producing things much closer to where they'll actually be consumed is one potential environmental benefit.
I would be wary of drawing that conclusion. For a start, I would question the definition of “urban”. I think in practice you need to split this out to distinguish between urban and suburban areas. And also I would very strongly question the assumption that living in an “urban” area automatically means you don't need to travel. I don't think that follows at all. Looking at present population patterns there are a significant number of people who don't live in the same urban location that they work in. Sometimes this is through choice, but increasingly I'd argue that it's part of the wider economic shakedown that is Britain's warped housing market, where wages for a particular locale are insufficient to actually live in that locale, so the only alternative is to live in a cheaper area and commute in.
Yes, you could argue that the future economic model would make the idea of commuting to work seem outdated, but there will always be some base level of need to commute from one urban area to another. There are also a significant number of urban and sub-urban areas in Britain that are notoriously badly served by public transport, and I happen to live in one such area. As such, I couldn't currently participate in the economy of this country without access to a car.
A £700 outlay being “cheap” is a relative term – even if you are buying it in instalments. Believe it or not, there are people out there for whom even that entry point is beyond anything they can hope to meet. We currently have families in this country who have to choose between staying warm and eating food – do you think they could stump up £700, or even £30 a month, for an embryonic 3D printer? (lets face it, the tech is still very much in it's infancy – I couldn't for example, print a ready-to-go replacement gearbox for my car, although I could print a working plastic model of one). Please also remember that there's the pre-requisite of having access to an up-to-date computer to either design the products, or at least connect to the 3D printer and pass it instructions. And let's also remember the cost of having electricity in the first place to power all these devices.
I didn't ask what size they would be, I asked who would own them.
What planet do you live on? Cars are incredibly cheap compared to houses – you can pick up an old banger for £500 one off outlay. Housing is nowhere near as cheap. My rent isn't going to drop or disappear because 3D printing is now a viable technology. I've still got to live somewhere – and generally speaking that “somewhere” will already be owned by another person who expects me to pay for the privilege. I'll ask you again – how would I pay my £800 per month rent (or mortgage) within the economic model you're proposing?
A lot of socialists don't believe in those things either. Your mental image of socialism dates from the 1950s. Common ownership of the means of production does not necessarily mean state ownership of the means of production. There are those who believe in socialism from the ground upwards in a loosely-organised, grass-roots, non-hierarchical way. Think anarchist Spain rather than Stalin's Russia.
I completely agree with you on that.
It could be. It would be like comparing the Conservatives before and after the leadership of Margaret Thatcher. Political parties can undergo radical transformations.
Not necessarily if you incorporate feedback loops that monitor demand.
Yes – that's why I included “art”.
Well there certainly won't be any monopolies when the sun goes supernova. I'm assuming you agree that they can be a problem throughout the period that they do exist?
There is a genuine problem whereby legislators lazily just assume that a market – irrespective of whether it's a monopoly or not – will simply stay the same forever. There's an inverted example in the energy sector, where the six or seven largest firms are subject to specific legislation which smaller, minor-league participants in the market aren't subject to.
Again, you're still talking in soundbytes – and also, you're telling me what you wouldn't do (“I'd stop telling people...”, rather than what you would do.
Also, there is the legitimate question over barriers to entry which you've not yet addressed – you cannot just assume that £700 or £70 or even £7 is affordable to all. The trajectory I see the economy taking in the future is, as you seemed to agree, one of less predictable, less frequent work. The logical consequence of this is lower overall incomes, and that potentially puts us in a position where smaller difference of income between individuals have an increasingly greater competitive advantage.
“Large” is a relative term. Any barriers to entry whatsoever will make some degree of difference, however marginal. It's just a question of degree.
Because it means that someone, somewhere, who was previously making a profit on the basis that they didn't have to clean up their crap will now be forced to pay to clean up their crap. It either means like-for-like lower profits for that person – or in extremis that the persons activities are in fact no longer profitable at all (if the cost of clearing up their crap exceeds the profit they were deriving from making it). That person – the one who's now being asked to pay more or take less – is going to have a problem with that. Consider that the people who fit into the category I've just described also tend to be some of society's wealthiest, most economically powerful people and you begin to understand why we don't have laws of this kind already.
Not when the price they paid was artificially discounted at the time (anything up to 60% off for houses, or 80% off for flats, depending on how long the tenant had occupied them) – and not when the price that's been paid only makes a partial “contribution” towards a) the true value of the asset that's being sold and b) the long-term social cost of privatising that asset on subsequent generations of people who can't afford a place to live. It also says nothing to the fact that the value of houses rose on average by 8% above inflation every year between the mid 80's and the 2008 crash – so there's a speculative opportunity-cost problem (externality) for society to cope with as well.
The price that was paid at the time comes nowhere near covering those costs – implementing the principles you claim to hold in full means recouping some of that lost communal value from the people who've gained in the intervening years as a result of selling those assets off into private, speculative hands.
You're assuming an all-knowing regulator – and I think most people would agree that the FCA and FSA are not omniscient, and are unlikely to become so in the near future. You're also missing the core point of wizardry in the city – it's primary purpose was to skirt around the reach of regulators, to render them ineffective by bamboozling them. This is why I never accept an argument based exclusively on “better regulation”. It always fails eventually.
Two things;
You still haven't explained why the state is a constraint in this scenario
If we're talking about breaking out of the benefits trap, then you really should have said “going out to work means you earn more money than the state determines as the minimum necessary to stay alive” rather than just “going out to work makes you money”, because you've omitted the relative comparison of the two standards.
That's encouraging. So how would you ensure that this happens? Minimum wage or some other mechanism? How do you propose to ensure that employers pay a level sufficiently higher than the state-determined minimum subsistence level?
Seriously? Because not everyone in Britain is a homeless person and not everyone in Britain shares the same socio-economic circumstances as small-town Canadians would have faced over 40 years ago. At this point I'm left wondering how good your understanding of the social sciences is. You do understand that what works for Group A might not work for Group B don't you? There is supposed to be a control group in studies of this kind, if they're considered credible. A sample size of 13 isn't really large enough to extrapolate findings across an entire society... Any of this ring a bell?
If the vast majority of the British electorate occupied the political centre, the Liberal Democrats would be in majority government today, not the Conservatives.
And for the record I didn't equate “a load of crap” with “the centre ground” – that's your interpretation of my statement.
What I meant by “load of crap” are things like compulsory ID cards, 90-day detention without trial, systematic and deliberate persecution of the vulnerable by the state by warping the support mechanisms the state itself is supposed to provide to the vulnerable. Do any of those sound like policies of the centre ground to you? If your answer is yes, then I can only conclude that you have absolutely no idea where the centre of British politics actually lies.
We cannot know conclusively what will mobilise the disengaged until they are actually mobilised. All we can know with a reasonable degree of certainty is that none of the mainstream large parties currently seem to have the right stuff to engage this group.
The SNP's defining message of the 2015 campaign was one of opposition to austerity – not a radical left policy perhaps, but a left one nevertheless. Expansionist, Keynesian economics aren't exactly a policy of the radical left, but they are a good deal further to the left than the current Conservatives are positioning themselves. That distinctiveness helped the SNP virtually clear the board in Scotland.
Also – I notice that you don't contest Labour's victories going back beyond 1974. Labour has at least 5 victories under its belt standing on a platform much further to the left than the lauded 1997 one.
Do you accept that it's possible for a politician to change a voter's mind through compelling, convincing argument? If your answer is no, then I struggle to see what value there is in continuing this conversation – because our respective approaches to the question of how politics should be conducted are essentially poles apart.
We're not talking about opinion polls here though are we. There is such a thing as an echo-chamber on the internet – the closed communities where people only socialise with like-minded folk, radical opinions can tend to re-enforce each other and potentially spiral into an arms race of who can be “truest” to the ideals of the community (i.e. who dares to be most extreme). That's not what I'm advocating here. I'm not suggesting that Labour should stop talking to people who voted Conservative. I am suggesting that they should stop talking (or arguing with) people who're closed-minded. People who've made up their mind that they're never going to vote Labour again no matter what. Like I said before when I invoked the realpolitik question – what would even be the point of engaging with someone like that? It would just amount to wasted hot air or keystrokes. Concentrate instead on open minded people (not saying that there aren't any open minded Conservatives – although perhaps am saying that there are proportionally fewer of them). It's a basic decision in terms of how a party expends it's limited financial and human resources. Concentrate on those people who might be prepared to support you - don't worry about the ones who never will.
Nobody, in the Labour party or outside, is going to accept the idea that signing control of everything over to a state ministry is the answer to all our problems – I'd like to think that we live in a more sceptical, less naïve age than that. Corbyn's not going there – he's not going anywhere near there.
I would completely agree on that. The three big fault lines running across our society are wealth, age and geography. Increasingly these three are forming a kind of self re-enforcing feedback loop; with the older generations hoarding an increasing proportion of the wealth, the young becoming increasingly impoverished and economically marginalised – all of which is contributing to the increasingly sharp geographical division of the country by age; mainly through the arbitrage of the housing market. The number of functional “communities” in the UK, whereby the relatively poor and relatively wealthy live in close proximity in the same locale across multiple generations, is starting to decrease.
An electoral system based on geographical constituencies potentially accelerates these underlying trends, leading to a very deeply divided divided country.
Well if you will not take my word hows about the World Health Organisation
The urban population in 2014 accounted for 54% of the total global population, up from 34% in 1960, and continues to grow. The urban population growth, in absolute numbers, is concentrated in the less developed regions of the world. It is estimated that by 2017, even in less developed countries, a majority of people will be living in urban areas.
Trends
The global urban population is expected to grow approximately 1.84% per year between 2015 and 2020, 1.63% per year between 2020 and 2025, and 1.44% per year between 2025 and 2030.
and I did not say that people would not need to travel - just the need for everyone to own a car. In places where Zip Car the mileage driven by car owners went down drastically.
Granted but then micro-manufacturing is not the only option - India has peer networks which are built around rickshaw drivers - and there position is being improved simply by being part of a larger network. There are even networks built around people sewing.
I'm sure given time I can think of a host of ways which are low cost that people could do, but I also think there is power in networks such as Indigogo and Kickstarter which provide extra finance if required. Look in countries such as Bangladesh and people of incredibly low incomes have taken advantage of loans from funding circles - with a repayment rate of 98% - higher than many traditional banks.
But that becomes relevant if the factory is not a large building with a large assembly line. Sized down to say the size of medium sized garage or even smaller then the cost is low enough for a small business person.
Even if it was large then modern manufacturing supports the possibility of renting it out.
Same as you and the differential is not the point - a car and house are the two most expensive things people buy, but if they do not need to own a car it is a cost that they do not need to face. Further freed fro being an employee a person is free to earn what they want, including enough for rent.
It is also why you need to look at things like a guaranteed income - because outside of the traditional employer/employee relationship things are not exactly easy and gaps or rapid changes in income are to be expected.
I am not making a proposal - just extrapolating from trends which have been going on for decades. Take BMW whose latest factory is also it's smallest, most automated and has the lowest staffing levels.
According to some on here that is precisely what socialism is about.
Whose talking monitoring demand - that is easy. Designing products from scratch that takes a person. Setting up machinery to create it requires a human.
Of course, which is why we have regulations which are supposed to prevent them - but the point still stands - a company gets to a certain size and it moves away from being innovative - and continues to protect market share. There is even a book about this called 'The Innovators Dilemma'
I would suggest that is a good idea - real innovation rarely comes from the larger companies - and it is through innovation that real change happens.
It comes from a central belief that people are all capable of something - and the thing is to find it - and show how they can make the most of that.
But at what point - unless we are going to have a point where the barrier to entry is essentially zero. There was the case a couple of years ago of the homeless man who ended up selling books - you can't get more lacking in resources than a person with no home. If he can do it what is the excuse others can give?
Insurmountable? There is in fact no reason why networks can not make a contribution themselves to help people get started. They could do it in lieu of fees later. It really is down to each of us to mold the society we want.
it does not need to - take packaging for example. It costs to produce and it costs to get rid of it. Do not have the packing and you have no need for the cost of clear-up.
It either means like-for-like lower profits for that person – or in extremis that the persons activities are in fact no longer profitable at all (if the cost of clearing up their crap exceeds the profit they were deriving from making it). That person – the one who's now being asked to pay more or take less – is going to have a problem with that. Consider that the people who fit into the category I've just described also tend to be some of society's wealthiest, most economically powerful people and you begin to understand why we don't have laws of this kind already.
You're assuming an all-knowing regulator – and I think most people would agree that the FCA and FSA are not omniscient, and are unlikely to become so in the near future. You're also missing the core point of wizardry in the city – it's primary purpose was to skirt around the reach of regulators, to render them ineffective by bamboozling them. This is why I never accept an argument based exclusively on “better regulation”. It always fails eventually.
Well a minimum wage pre-supposes that we are talking about an employer/employee paradigm and that is already breaking down with the rise of the self-employed - already numbering over 4m of Britain's workers. But say we are the first thing is education - properly renumerated workers are also more productive leading to higher profits but the other side is to ween employers off the absurd system that gives people benefits because the employer is not paying them enough and part of that is own to the employer taxes he or she pays - first part of that is to encourage paying at least the living wage - and one way you could do that is reduce employer taxes on those that do.
I'm not a sociologist, I did economics. But yes seriously and if you look at the various experiments in a basic guaranteed income they do end up paying for themselves in higher overall productivity of the group being tested. Even if it does not we may find a need to modify our tax system. If we are moving to a system of Peer networks then it may need the networks themselves to be taxed to pay for it.
I would suggest you read a couple of books that show how Peer networks and 3d printing is opening up opportunities.
Makers By Christopher Anderson,
The Longer Long Tail: How Endless Choice is Creating Unlimited Demand
Peers Inc by Robin Chase (co-founder of ZipCar)
Many of the questions you are asking are referred to in those.
The world is changing and we really need to take advantage. The answers are not to be found in arguments about the disparities in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th Century.
Well that would only apply if you didnt think the Conservatives were a centre ground party.
Well Labour lost support to UKIP in several areas - how is moving to the Left going to motivate those voters to return to the fold?
I'm not sure that going back almost 50 years is very constructive - you have to fight elections on the issues of today not what happened at a very different time and in very different circumstances in the past.
Of course people can change their minds - but you have to have a somewhat coherent argument to put.
and as I have said - the floating voters are in the centre ground, not off at the extreme margins.
If there was a correlation between increasing levels of urbanisation and a reduced need to own a car, I would expect the car-per-head ratio to drop as the urbanisation rate rises. In the UK at least, this is not the case – both the urbanisation rate and the car-per-head ratio are rising.
The underlying mathematics of private ownership don't change – although the numbers may flex with scale. The reason I ask who owns them is because, realistically, in a context based on private ownership there will always be a group or strata that owns the micro-factories / advanced 3D printers (and is able to glean an economic advantage from them) – and a group that doesn't own them; or rather cannot afford to own them. Unless of course you're proposing that micro-scale 3D printers will become as ubiquitous as, say, shoes? But that still leaves open the question of the larger scale 3D printing plant required to produce larger, more complex or specialist goods that the standard printers cannot handle. Those, presumably, will still only be accessible to those with deep pockets – or potentially to those who're prepared to pool resources via crowdfunding to acquire such equipment.
There is also the question of who owns and controls the supply of raw material which is a necessary input into the 3D printing process. In the world where every second person owns a 3D printer, the man who can provide the equivalent of the ink cartridges is king.
It is the point if you're making the following claim; “take away the second of those - all those costs now reduced to near nothing ”
I don't know how you've arrived at the conclusion that removing the £500 or £1,000 cost of a car does anything to reduce the £250,000 cost of a house. If you remove the need for me to have a car, then yes, you've removed the need for me to spend £1,000 - and I'm £1,000 better off as a result. Now please explain how the 3D printing revolution will do away with my need for basic shelter so I don't have to pay rent or a mortgage. And also please explain how the bank / landlord won't then take the view that I've got an extra £1,000 in my pocket, and raise the rent / mortgage rate accordingly to take it off me.
I can't help but smirk at the way you phrased that. “Free to earn what they want”. Really.
According to Conservative ideology, how is that any different from the present day? Don't people currently have this freedom? What's to stop the Tory MP walking up to the homeless person, leaning down and offering the reassuring words “don't worry, you have the freedom to earn what you want.”?
“Freedom to” is distinct from “ability to” and “opportunity to”. I know you probably meant “work as much or as little as they feel they need to” (or similar), but your choice of wording there was very “let them eat cake”.
OK you've restored some sense here – I'll give you credit for that.
Yes and I think that's part of the problem for me. You're espousing aspirations, views and positions – albeit ones that are well informed in terms of the likely changes ahead in the economy – rather than a definitive set of actions that would help prepare society for these changes. It probably doesn't help my understanding of your position that we don't share a basic ideological starting point – we start from opposing positions in fact. I consider myself a socialist, you consider yourself an anti-socialist.
That's exactly the reason why I anticipate a low work future instead of a high work one.
With respect to “some on here”, anyone advocating a return to the old Leninist collectivisations and centralised economic planning of the Soviet Union will get very short shrift from me. Milovan Djilas' work on the failure of the top-down Soviet model to accomplish its stated aims, and the propensity of the old bourgeoisie class to be supplanted by the officials and apparatchiks of the state (a failure on its own terms) is a strong influence on my own thinking.
That's why I included “art” in my (short) list of things that can't be automated.
Not necessarily – there is the possibility of creating technology that is self-configuring and self-repairing.
The article you link to contains a rather important sentence which may help to explain how this transformation came about: “When he got a council flat, he began trading on eBay.” Doesn't sound like the state was a constraint in this guy's case, does it.
At which point, you've put the packaging producer completely out of business instead of just putting a dent in their profits. Most economic growth is built on the promotion of artificially created needs – yes, packaging (in most cases) is one of them.
Or alternatively double the taxes of those that don't. I agree with the principle, but why should the state finances take a hit to reward people for simply doing the right thing?
Maybe I'll give them a look.
Neither are they to be found in a slavish devotion to a free-market ideology that dates back even further to Adam Smith and the 18th Century.
I don't think the Conservatives are a centrist party.
If things in politics worked on a nice, easy to understand, linear scale – people would only defect by degrees from their current party to the nearest one on the ideological spectrum. The fact that people did jump from Labour straight to UKIP kind of makes a mockery of the centre ground thesis. I remember one man being interviewed who said he'd narrowed down his choice at the 2015 election to two parties - “UKIP or the Greens” he said. In conventional political logic, that just doesn't compute.
Labour can win voters back from UKIP if it comes up with a compelling answer to the observation that Nigel Farage loves to repeat at every opportunity – that increased migration, particularly of low-skilled workers – has the effect of dragging down wages within a particular locality to the lowest common denominator, because it's eroded the relative bargaining power of the average job-seeker. I don't disagree with the analysis by the way – there are areas of the country where this clearly has happened, and no amount of argument that begins “but the NHS...” or “but increased GDP...” will cut the mustard with people who're at the raw end of these demographic changes. Labour must build a credible alternative remedy for this problem – either by taking steps to increase the bargaining power of all (including migrants) relative to capital and employers, or take steps to restrict the flow of low-skilled workers in the country – or both. Such answers can be advocated from a left platform but would be unthinkable from a centrist one.
It can be constructive if the conditions that we thought we'd eradicated forever are, in fact, returning. I heard an interview with a GP on the radio this morning. The topic of conversation? The return of rickets – and the demonstrable malnutrition of school kids during the summer holidays when school dinners aren't available and their parents cannot afford to feed them properly to fill the gap. Disturbingly these are the kind of problems we experienced 50 or 60 years ago – they are returning. Don't lazily assume progress is a one way street. If the solutions of 50 years ago are finding traction in the society of today, one possible reason may be that the problems of 50 years ago haven't been solved after all.
What element of Corbyn's proposed platform is incoherent? I've heard lots of assertions that it's unpopular, or that it would render Labour unelectable – I've yet to hear objections based on the idea that Corbyn can't form coherent sentences or that his ideas are internally inconsistent or contradictory.
Except presumably those who float between Labour and UKIP, or between the Greens and UKIP. Not everyone gets fed up and becomes a Tory.
Theres your problem.
Well increasing the bargaining power (and therefore presumably wages) isnt going to help as it simply makes the UK even more attractive for unskilled workers.
Restricting the flow of workers could work but it would be incompatible with Labours support for membership of the EU (remember Labour didnt even want a referendum on membership). OK Corbyn has history of being a Euroskeptic - is he going to take the rest of the Party with him though?
But saying that you can apply 50 year old remedies to problems is just not feasible - the world has changed a lot in 50 years. We have open borders, globalisation, a total change in the economic situation and a completely different social attitude.
Well I am more interested in his policy ideas and given that for obvious reasons he is light on detail then you can only go on what he has historically supported. As a for instance, he is an enthusiastic supporter of a regime that hangs people for being Gay - if that is the correct policy for a Left-wing government I would say that is rather incoherent stance.
If you're claiming that the Conservatives are a centrist party, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that.
Left-euroscepticism I think is about to undergo something of a revival. I get the impression that Corbyn thought long and hard before clarifying his position yesterday as “want to stay in the EU so that we can change it”. He is canny enough to realise that openly beating the drum for Brexit might be a bridge too far at the moment. In the unlikely event that he becomes PM and actually gets the chance to pursue this course of action, I think it will ultimately end in failure. We have witnessed a clear demonstration of what the EU is actually about (or, should I say what Germany is actually about) through its conduct towards Greece. If the British left try to reform from within, they'll fail. Reform from within would require a critical mass demanding radical change which just isn't there at the moment. My personal attitude towards the EU at this point in history is that it cannot be salvaged – and that those of us who consider ourselves pro-European and internationalists in the truest sense of the word will need to build the new Europe on the smashed rubble of the old one, rather than delude ourselves that any kind of meaningful or positive social change will break out from inside the current EU, with a new and better Europe emerging from the old one like a butterfly shedding its chrysalis.
Will the Labour party come around to this view? I don't know – but I would say that the largest determining factor in answering the question will be the conduct of the EU over the next decade or so. Further German intransigence and the pursuit of economic policies that even the IMF admits don't work will be a powerful argument in favour of the stance that the late Bob Crow took. Watch very closely the next time a crisis emerges (it won't be too long – if nothing else they haven't actually solved the Greek problem). Crow argued that no progressive, socially egalitarian political project was possible in today's Europe – he is on the cusp of being proven posthumously correct.
Firstly, please point to a single element of Corbyn's platform that fits the criteria of being a “50 year old remedy”...
Secondly, the age of an idea is no guide as to it's validity. The NHS for example pre-dates the time-frame you've cited here and is generally considered one of the country's greatest political (and social) successes – and is something that only a few on the fringe are prepared to consider culling. The old-age pension dates back even further – should we dispense with it just because it pre-dates the first world war? The limited company is an even older idea; can we get rid of those yet?
What matters in the end is whether an idea works or not. You and I will probably argue vociferously over the criteria for defining what success looks like – but then that's what politics is all about. You and I clearly want to live in very different societies.
Within living memory we in Britain lobotomised people for being gay. You cannot expect social tolerance and liberalism to spread across the world if the self-appointed advocates of tolerance and liberalism also turn a blind eye to other injustices – even those perpetrated against groups or societies who are themselves no angels. The faults of the Palestinian authorities doesn't make Israel right. The rule of IS in northern Iraq or the horrific actions of the Assad government in Syria doesn't mean everyone who lives in those places is a moral reprobate or a psychopathic fanatic. One injustice doesn't cancel out another – and if you set the bar as high as you seem to want to, nobody is worth protecting, because all are guilty of something in someone's view. If perfection is the standard, we'll all fail the test.
I wasn't coming at it from the perspective of right and wrong, but I suspect your question is rhetorical.
Really? I think it was Miliband who cost Labour the 2015 election.
And up against no less a personality than Churchill to boot!
Despite that, I'm still not convinced that in 2015 any combination of policies would have overcome the antipathy of the electorate (and some inside the Labour party) towards Miliband.
But on balance, I have warmed to your argument. Policy does matter, and 1945 is an excellent example of a nation voting for something rather than because of someone.
Despite this, Blair and Thatcher show that personality also matters. For Thatcher it took a war to bring it out. Blair always had it.
Having now had the chance to see a bit more of Corbyn, it's clear he will be a polarising figure if he wins. It's still an open question (for me) as to whether he has that political X factor necessary to capture the heart and minds of voters.
ETA: And not just voters in general, but also members of the Labour Party itself. If he can't bring them together as a team, Labour will struggle to convince the rest of us that it's fit for government come 2020.
Well good luck to him. If he doesn't have whatever it is that has people follow a political leader, I doubt he'll manage to achieve that.