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UK Politics - From Russia with Love


Which Tyler

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On 4/21/2018 at 9:26 AM, Werthead said:

I'm pretty sure that's the underlying challenge of the 21st Century: the current economic paradigm has run its course, is coming to its end and is unsustainable from a practical or technological viewpoint, so will have to change, with the possible outcomes ranging from the utopian (a world where most people don't have to work and robots and AI do drudgery for us) to Fallout.

Yes; over time more and more wealth has been concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Initially this meant that the lives of almost everyone in the world were getting better. Certainly, there are fewer people living in poverty now than there were in 1990 - and there were far fewer people alive then. China and India have been especially better places to live compared to 30 years ago.

However, wealth inequality necessarily means that those getting rich do so at the expense of the poor. There are finite resources and hoarding them means others go without. Now, the world is seeing a slowdown in improvements and where once inequality meant everyone was better off, just some people less so, now it means a regression of living conditions for the poor.

This is partly because environmental disasters have been disproportionately hitting areas such as Bangladesh, whose rising sea levels are displacing millions much more so than the comparatively small rises the rest of the world has seen. And it's partly because the replacement of human labour with machinery has accelerated to the point where even developed nations have begun to see their work-forces shrink, with no avenues forward for those who have been made obsolete.

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While discussing Romania, it's interesting to note that it is experiencing one of the strongest economic growths in Europe, while simultaneously losing population. Bulgaria has lost at least 20% of its population over the last 20 years and yet keeps growing economically. The same is true of Hungary, ex-Yugoslavia and the Baltic countries.

It is definitely possible to keep growing the economy while the population is shinking. An increase in productivity can offset the loss of workforce, and increase in standard of living can offset the loss in quantity of consumers.

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8 hours ago, mankytoes said:

If you're going to say that, I'd appreciate it if you at least gave some reason why

I mean, you seem to understand why, so I'm not sure what the issue is. Romania is, like China, an outlier where an exceptional policy was enforced by authoritarian control - a policy relating to native birth, not immigration. The usefulness of such examples for a discussion about immigration in democracies is very close to nil. 

And it's really not hard to find better examples to use - you did so in the same post. 

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2 hours ago, Gorn said:

While discussing Romania, it's interesting to note that it is experiencing one of the strongest economic growths in Europe, while simultaneously losing population. Bulgaria has lost at least 20% of its population over the last 20 years and yet keeps growing economically. The same is true of Hungary, ex-Yugoslavia and the Baltic countries.

It is definitely possible to keep growing the economy while the population is shinking. An increase in productivity can offset the loss of workforce, and increase in standard of living can offset the loss in quantity of consumers.

Or maybe gaining free and unimpeded access to the mass market of more than half a billion people, and through their formidable trade and negotiating strength, quite a large part of the world?

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An economy is grown by increasing production and consumption. One way to do this by a) increasing population, which grows the workforce and increases the number of consumers.

However, you can achieve the same effect by b ) increasing productivity of your workforce by technological advances and c) improving the purchasing power of your existing consumers. As long as b ) and c) grow faster than a) is falling, you won't have a problem.

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37 minutes ago, Gorn said:

An economy is grown by increasing production and consumption. One way to do this by a) increasing population, which grows the workforce and increases the number of consumers.

However, you can achieve the same effect by b ) increasing productivity of your workforce by technological advances and c) improving the purchasing power of your existing consumers. As long as b ) and c) grow faster than a) is falling, you won't have a problem.

b ) and c) are relatively easy to do if you are a poor country with huge growth potential, like those you listed. An advanced economy with already high levels of productivity and technological advancement is a whole other kettle of fish.

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Quote

 

However, you can achieve the same effect by b ) increasing productivity of your workforce by technological advances and c) improving the purchasing power of your existing consumers. As long as b ) and c) grow faster than a) is falling, you won't have a problem.

 

This of course is problematic when b ) will directly result in c ) shrinking catastrophically, which is something else we are starting to see happen, with, so far, no constructive suggestions from the capitalist right (i.e. those who are causing the problem) on how to minimise or mitigate it.

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5 hours ago, Werthead said:

This of course is problematic when b ) will directly result in c ) shrinking catastrophically, which is something else we are starting to see happen, with, so far, no constructive suggestions from the capitalist right (i.e. those who are causing the problem) on how to minimise or mitigate it.

since the Right likes good old traditions, maybe we can go for a really old one.

 

Spikes, Heads, Walls.       But this time do it with a french influence, Brexit be dammed.

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My Facebook page is regularly getting stories showing up about the deportation of UK residents, but not citizens, who have lived in the UK for 40 years or more, particularly the "Windrush" folk.

What the heck is happening and why are people not expressing more outrage? Can someone explain this? It sounds like the US...

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6 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

My Facebook page is regularly getting stories showing up about the deportation of UK residents, but not citizens, who have lived in the UK for 40 years or more, particularly the "Windrush" folk.

What the heck is happening and why are people not expressing more outrage? Can someone explain this? It sounds like the US...

It's been front-page news here for the past few days, it's certainly stirred up some anger and outrage and it has led to an apparent freeze on these deportations. So in this case the outcry has been effective.

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14 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

My Facebook page is regularly getting stories showing up about the deportation of UK residents, but not citizens, who have lived in the UK for 40 years or more, particularly the "Windrush" folk.

What the heck is happening and why are people not expressing more outrage? Can someone explain this? It sounds like the US...

after the war, a lot of people where brought into the Uk to help re-build us as a nation.  one of the ships they arrived on was called the Windrush.

they where given resident status. the children that came with the workers grew up here, and many believed they where full citizens.  a while ago  under either a Labour or Tory government all their official paperwork was shredded.  which means the government has no idea who is here legally or not.  then a few years ago, we officially did not like migrants and made policies that made things hard for them.  people that could not prove they had a right to be here, were denied medical aid.  welfare, often was fired from their job cos the government demanded the employer prove the worker is legally entitled to work here.  and then also they face deportation.

 

we don't know how many have been deported.  the government won't tell us.

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1 minute ago, Pebble said:

after the war, a lot of people where brought into the Uk to help re-build us as a nation.  one of the ships they arrived on was called the Windrush.

they where given resident status. the children that came with the workers grew up here, and many believed they where full citizens.  a while ago  under either a Labour or Tory government all their official paperwork was shredded.  which means the government has no idea who is here legally or not.  then a few years ago, we officially did not like migrants and made policies that made things hard for them.  people that could not prove they had a right to be here, were denied medical aid.  welfare, often was fired from their job cos the government demanded the employer prove the worker is legally entitled to work here.  and then also they face deportation.

 

we don't know how many have been deported.  the government won't tell us.

Lord have mercy, the bungling of bureaucracies. I have been reading the stories with horror and pity. :crying:

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Basically the Windrush story is a tale of modern British politics.

The government found that immigration was becoming unpopular, particularly immigration from people with the wrong colour of skin or who spoke funny or had funny religions. So they pledged to cut it to an arbitrary and unrealistic number. Then they found they could not actually do that.

Rather than step back at this point, the government doubled down and created 'the hostile environment'. This was a policy specifically designed to do exactly what it did in fact do to the Windrush people - make their lives hell and encourage them to go away. Not to them in particular, you understand, but to all immigrants, including them. At no point, contrary to what they're now saying, did the government intend that the policy should not apply to Windrush folks.

Unfortunately the public is a fickle lot, and the Windrush people being affected proved to be unpopular. When they said 'get rid of immigrants', they didn't ever imagine that it would affect immigrants they liked! So the government are now engaged in an attempt to pretend that this was all a misunderstanding, instead of the whole aim of their policy.

The whole story is about how the government, in order to survive, has to be xenophobic, but not too xenophobic. We want immigrants to go home, but not these ones. We want a hard border with France, but not Ireland. We want all sorts of inconsistent and illogical things and the government will happily pretend they're reasonable and sensible policies if only they can stay in office another month or two.

Governance in this country is a shambles.

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The main point on the Windrush thing is that anyone born in a Commonwealth country who moved to the U.K. before 1971 was automatically granted indefinite leave to remain, but the government at the time never actually made a record of who these people were. Now that the Tories have made it so that employers, landlords, healthcare, etc have to check that people are legally allowed to be in the country, these folks are finding that they are unable to prove their citizenship.

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13 hours ago, Gorn said:

An economy is grown by increasing production and consumption. One way to do this by a) increasing population, which grows the workforce and increases the number of consumers.

However, you can achieve the same effect by b ) increasing productivity of your workforce by technological advances and c) improving the purchasing power of your existing consumers. As long as b ) and c) grow faster than a) is falling, you won't have a problem.

I'll put a bit of a spanner in the works here: why do I want economies to grow? Why is growth inherently good?

I only ask because it's literally impossible for growth to be infinite when resources are finite. At some point there will be no more resources that can be extracted at a faster rate than they already are. At which point things will either enter equilibrium or terminal decline.

Either way, at some point growth must stop. So what's the end goal? Why not just aim for it now?

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Growth, from a leftish perspective, is mainly good because it is the only way to get to a more egalitarian society, since only growth can actually be redistributed (apart from the French method of torches, pitchforks and guillotines). However, as we are seeing in our lifetimes, while growth may be necessary for less wealth inequality, it is insufficient for it. So, while I want some growth, I am willing to go for lower growth rates as long as the gains are distributed fairly (which, currently, is not the case.)

I only ever heard econ 101 though, so @OldGimletEye, please correct me if I am wrong about this.

Also, at least some resources are virtually inexhaustible, mainly those that can be regenerated using sunlight (as the sun will be shining for the remainder of human existence anyway).

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1 hour ago, theguyfromtheVale said:

So, while I want some growth, I am willing to go for lower growth rates as long as the gains are distributed fairly (which, currently, is not the case.)

I only ever heard econ 101 though, so @OldGimletEye, please correct me if I am wrong about this.

Economic growth is important because it tends to increase economic welfare.

But, what we really are interested in is increasing human welfare and it’s not necessarily the same as growth, particularly if all the growth goes to the top. Focusing solely on growth kind of frames the conversation to the right’s advantage. And indeed some have suggested we need to develop aggregate indexes that measure overall human welfare, with growth perhaps just being one component.

It’s hard for me to comment on other countries, being that I don’t know their histories and their fundamental political and economic disputes as I do in my own country the US. But, here in the US, the the right wing Party, the Republican Party, talks incessantly about it’s “pro growth supply side policies” , but the truth is that, compared to it’s own rhetoric, it stinks at it. Over the 20th Century, the Democratic Party, which is the party associated with left wing politics in the US, proved to be better at it, while at the same time producing growth that was more equitable.

And then of of course I can’t emphasize enough, the shear stupidity of the Republican Party, during the GFC with it’s doctrines of “expansionary austerity” its gold buggism and its inflationista fear mongering. The damage done by the GFC and the sub optimal policy response to it, will probably have negative growth effects for a very long time.

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Can we get back onto the topic of UK politics specifically and not the general topic of whether growth is good? I feel like we've gone far enough down the sidebar that it either needs its own thread, or to be dropped. 

Going back to UK politics, then, how do people feel about the selection of an apparent conspiracy theorist as a Labour candidate for a presumably target seat? I think people can guess how I feel about people questioning whether the Manchester bombing actually took place, but it does raise the issue of whether someone can be a good MP and still hold such... let's say, ill-founded views?

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