Thursday 5th January 2023

[refitman]

Morning all.

[frog222]

Morning refit

[AnatolyKasparov]

Good morefternoon, everyone.

[frog222]

Thread For Roger __

[Sky'sGoneOut]

I take it we were all suitably inspired by Starmer's speech today?

I don't know about anyone else but I thought that co-opting brexiteer slogans was a master-stroke. Really won me over that did.

Didn't make me cringe, hold my head in my hands, or mutter 'for fuck's sake' at all.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

I'm beginning to suspect I may have hallucinated the time Carol Vorderman went on Question Time and transformed into a raving Tory Harpy.



Oh no wait, it did happen. She was an advisor to Cameron at the time.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Allister Heath is back!

Nobody wants to confront the truth: Britain is becoming a poor country

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/0 ... r-country/

When will we finally wake up, and jolt out of our debilitating stupor? Britain as we know it faces an existential crisis. Crippled by scores of pathologies, from an imploding health service to sliding real wages, our status as one of the wealthiest, most civilised countries in the world is at risk for the first time since the Industrial Revolution.

We are gradually going the way of Argentina, once one of richest nations, and until the 1960s more prosperous than many European powers, but now an impoverished, unstable basket-case. We are likely to soon see a new generation of young, ambitious British people seek their fortunes abroad.

His solution? Scrap the NHS.

Why is it still taboo to call for the NHS to be scrapped, and replaced by a better system? If our politics were working properly, the NHS’s chief executive and the bosses of numerous trusts would have been sacked, and we would be in the middle of a national debate about building a new health system fit for the 21st century. We would be discussing charging people who can afford it, and moving towards a German or Swiss-style social insurance model.

Oh and 'massive' welfare reform which would require some 'tough love'.

[frog222]

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Here's an answer for Allister.

How the U.K. Became One of the Poorest Countries in Western Europe

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters ... it/671847/

In the past 30 years, the British economy chose finance over industry, Britain’s government chose austerity over investment, and British voters chose a closed and poorer economy over an open and richer one. The predictable results are falling wages and stunningly low productivity growth. Although British media worry about robots taking everybody’s jobs, the reality is closer to the opposite. “Between 2003 and 2018, the number of automatic-roller car washes (that is, robots washing your car) declined by 50 percent, while the number of hand car washes (that is, men with buckets) increased by 50 percent,” the economist commentator Duncan Weldon told me in an interview for my podcast, Plain English. “It’s more like the people are taking the robots’ jobs.”

That might sound like a quirky example, because the British economy is obviously more complex than blokes rubbing cars with soap. But it’s an illustrative case. According to the International Federation of Robotics, the U.K. manufacturing industry has less technological automation than just about any other similarly rich country. With barely 100 installed robots per 10,000 manufacturing workers in 2020, its average robot density was below that of Slovenia and Slovakia. One analysis of the U.K.’s infamous “productivity puzzle” concluded that outside of London and finance, almost every British sector has lower productivity than its Western European peers.

Thus, the U.K., the first nation to industrialize, was also the first to deindustrialize. Britain gave rise to the productivity revolution that changed the world, and now it has some of the worst productivity statistics of any major economy. What was once the world’s most powerful globalized empire has now voted to explicitly reduce global access to trade and talent. Since Brexit, immigration, exports, and foreign investment have all declined, likely reducing the size of the U.K.’s economy by several percentage points in the long run.

On the right, the electorate is dominated by older voters who care more about culture wars than about competitiveness. “In 2019, when Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party won a big majority in the House of Commons, most people of working age did not vote for them,” Weldon told me. “I’m pretty sure that’s the first time that’s ever happened. You have this post-economic, older, economically insulated voting bloc that could afford to be anti-growth almost as a luxury, because they don’t have to care about economic outcomes.”

The U.K. is now an object lesson for other countries dealing with a dark triad of deindustrialization, degrowth, and denigration of foreigners. Having offshored industry in favor of finance, its economy wasn’t resilient. The resulting erosion in living standards made the public desperate for something to blame. Blame-seeking conservatives spotted bogeymen abroad. Brexit cut off the economy from further growth and set the stage for a rolling political circus.

[refitman]

I take it we were all suitably inspired by Starmer's speech today?

I don't know about anyone else but I thought that co-opting brexiteer slogans was a master-stroke. Really won me over that did.

Didn't make me cringe, hold my head in my hands, or mutter 'for fuck's sake' at all.

[frog222]

I take it we were all suitably inspired by Starmer's speech today?

The truth about who Starmer is really is, is so shallowly buried that the stink of the corpse should really be more evident as time passes .

[RogerOThornhill]

Good evening.

[refitman]

What Simon said

[gilsey]

Allister Heath is back!

His solution? Scrap the NHS.

Why is it still taboo to call for the NHS to be scrapped, and replaced by a better system? If our politics were working properly, the NHS’s chief executive and the bosses of numerous trusts would have been sacked, and we would be in the middle of a national debate about building a new health system fit for the 21st century. We would be discussing charging people who can afford it, and moving towards a German or Swiss-style social insurance model.

Surreal.

The least competent govt we've ever had but we should trust it to develop and implement a 'better system'.

Overnight, because they've already sacked the existing management.

[AnatolyKasparov]

What ceasefire??

[gilsey]

Orthodox Christmas.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Did anyone else sit a '16+' exam in the Eighties? I was in the top set for maths almost all the way up to sitting my O level but was (rightly) moved down a set and ended up sitting a 16+ instead. If you did well enough in it you were awarded an O level grade C, which I got because the exam was an absolute piece of piss that I finished about 20 minutes early. Later I got a look at the proper O level maths paper and there was absolutely no way I'd have got a C if I'd sat that exam, I'd have failed completely. I've always felt weirdly guilty about it.

[AnatolyKasparov]

Orthodox Christmas.

I know that, was more doubting that it will actually be observed. And many Ukrainians celebrated Xmas the same time as us Westerners this time round.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

Hmm...that was odd. I couldn't get through to the forum for a while, then when I tried again I got a Firefox security warning about possible malicious content which I ignored. Never had that before.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

I can't seem to replicate the error so I'm just going to add it to the other weird shit I've experienced today which included having to save a lady dog walker from having her leg humped by an over excited border collie. It was after her little poodle but she'd lifted it up so the collie went to town on her leg instead. It was still thrusting and barking as I removed it. I was going to say pulled it off but...Anyway the collie owner was an absolute arsehole. A fat red faced clown who eventually wheezed his way up to us and tried to blame the little poodle for being in heat even though the woman said it had been spayed, which he admitted his own dog hadn't been.

I would like to say my initial reaction to encountering a middle aged woman being humped on the leg by a collie dog was one of concern but I'm ashamed to admit there was some childish amusement involved.

[AnatolyKasparov]

I take it we were all suitably inspired by Starmer's speech today?

It was better than Sunak's the previous day.

And who knows, that may be all he needs.

[Sky'sGoneOut]

After trawling through people I'd regard to be 'centrist' Starmer supporters' Twitter accounts I was surprised today at the almost entire lack of adoration and genuflection.

And now AK gives us a 'meh'.

This country is fucked. Properly fucked like none of us have ever seen it before. Basic shit that we've grown up with is broken.

This isn't the Nineties where things still worked but were a bit shit, I just had to fill my own tooth with some German stuff I got from Ebay because the dental appointment I made in August was cancelled in December and they told me to reschedule an appointment after the new year. This shit is new. We're being left to fend for ourselves.

And where is Labour in these dark times? Offering meaningless tinkering with used brexiteer marketing.

Fuck off.

[Sky'sGoneOut]