>>27003 >Right-wingers and centrists blamed the Great Recession on too much public spending, at least in the UK they did
I don't recall this at all, I think you're either telling porkies or deliberately misremembering. On all sides the recession was blamed on financial organisations obscuring their ballooning risk with ever more complex instruments and chasing growth so fanatically that nobody cared they'd been building their portfolios on sand. Everyone recognised the subprime mortgage crisis as the worst offender in this. What differed was government responses, and ours was to decrease public spending and bring down the national debt, a commitment that made the UK economy as a whole look more stable and reliable to investors. Was it the right decision? I don't know enough about economics to say. I suspect whatever view people have on it depends entirely on what papers they read. In any case austerity has gone out the window under Johnson so don't expect any ruthless cuts if the economy really does implode in the next few years.
>>27035 You're right - I was deeply involved in the credit crunch, it was all about financial products called credit derivatives, the trading and systems of which I am a bit of an expert in. Gordon Brown decided to bail out a bunch of banks that deserved to fail (which many of us who work in the financial markets thought he probably shouldn't have done), but it was the guys after him (Cameron/Osborne) who then decided to decimate public spending as a reaction to that, to try and make the economy look good.
>>27035 They very rarely outright said "the GFC was caused by the last Labour government spending too much", but there was a lot along the line of this tweet which clearly implies that Labour wrecked the economy by borrowing too much and would do it again if they got back into office. But of course, you can use slight of hand to defend it by making the dubious claim that no link is being claimed, or that what they really mean is that Labour should've spent slightly less so that our national debt pre-crisis would be 5% lower than it was, so that post-crisis it would be 75% rather than 80%, as though that would somehow constitute a non-wrecked economy.
Now obviously this is a campaign poster, not a newspaper article or TV interview - but politically those operated on the same basic principle of not technically saying it, but very clearly implying it. See Cameron's 2012 conference speech:
>“We haven’t forgotten, you know. We remember who spent our golden legacy, who sold our gold …who busted our banks, who smothered our businesses … who wracked up our debts, who wrecked our economy …who ruined our reputation, who risked our future …who did this? – Labour did this – and this country should never forget it.”
Now he's not outright saying "Labour spent too much and that wrecked the economy", but again it's implied by the way that they're constantly grouped together.
(Honestly this sort of thing is why I'm happy that lying has come into vogue in politics. Catching someone in an outright lie is easy, trying to lay out their rhetorical trickery makes you sound faintly mad...)
>>27048 Sleight of hand, not slight. It's one of those words that's only ever used in that particular context so understandable nobody knows its spelling.
Stuff like this makes me angry that Labour's campaigning is always so tame and tries to take the higher ground. The Tories aren't shy of just flinging mud and saying "It was Labour what done it, whatever it was."
Why don't we see Labour campaigns more along the lines of "The Tories are as bent as a nine bob note, Boris Johnson is a Russian asset. David Cameron licked Xi Jinping's un-wiped arsehole and would do it again, vote Tory if you want the backbone of UK infrastructure selling off to Chinese communists."
>>27050>>27051 I think Starmer is getting firmer on this. Miliband always seemed to be on the back foot and reacting to the narrative Cameron and Osborne were allowed to set. Corbyn tended to waffle on and make really long-winded points or target nebulous concepts like austerity.
>>27054 As someone who was never in the Labour choir it ended up coming across as typical browbeating that turned people off. People are all too used to Labour making hysterical claims like "you have 240.23 hours to save the NHS" and it doesn't work outside the circle.
The better option would've been to attack the Tories as anti-growth and dare I say it anti-British by selling out the country from under us. Deficit reduction was a foregone conclusion at the time, the debate should've been over investment to both increase revenue while leaving everyone more prosperous and setting up future growth. Not that this matters now of course.
Not while cases are still jumping up, no. I'd give it another 6 months by which time we'll all be dealing with the fallout of whatever the fuck is going to happen to the global economy. A managed transition, working from home to unemployment at home.
The figure to watch is confirmed cases in the developed world. Once that collapses we're just facing sporadic UK outbreaks as it becomes endemic to MENA.
>>27053 The counterarguments are hard though.
"You actually spend your way out of debt because what matters isn't how many pounds you owe, but the ratio of debt to GDP. By borrowing a shitton of money and throwing it at getting economic growth going, you can wind up much richer relative to the amount of debt you have and so actually less indebted by any meaningful measure" is the sort of thing that makes a normal person think you're stark raving mad.
(To the point I feel like I have to give an household example: Imagine you make £10k a year and are £15k in debt. If you borrow another £5k to buy a car which lets you get a job earning £40k a year, you're now £20k in debt, but instead of debt being 150% of what you earn in a year it's 50% of what you earn in a year. Even this is more contrived than the household example for austerity: "You shouldn't spend more than you earn")
>>27055 I don't see it. The credit crunch wrekced our economy.
You can consolidate the explanation even further and reduce it to a simple sentence like "the best way to get out of debt is to start earning more money, not tying string around your bollocks and slowly tightening it".
But again that's not really the point. It's a hard message to deliver when the Tory's version has the advantage of just sounding like "common sense", and moreover, goes along with the national zeitgeist carefully cultivated by the tabloids over the previous fifteen years. It's simply one of those things no amount of logical persuasion will change someone's mind on, once they've decided what camp they're in.
Labour need to sidestep everything the Tories attack them on, and instead make a flanking blow that attacks something the Tories can't defend. As another lad pointed out, selling the country out from under us would be a good one- You could make a massive billboard campaign about all the power stations, phone masts, utility companies etc that are owned by the Chinese. The added sting in the tail is that it would allow them to claim the turf of being the patriotic, pro-British party, which Labour has been pathologically averse to for so long, but which the Conservatives have basically relied on for the last twenty years.
Labour can't attack anyone on that basis as they have essentially reverted to the neoliberal consensus. Anything else would be portrayed as backward-thinking communism.
Why not? This is the entire point lad, nothing has been stopping the Tories from running campaigns based on fantasies entirely divorced from the reality of what their government will actually achieve, and people lap it up.
>We'll reduce immigration!
It actually went up.
>We'll solve the national debt!
It's at the highest it has ever been.
>We'll take back control!
We'll still be getting no-deal deadline extensions in 2040.
Neo-liberal consensus or not, Labour government would at least mean public services are funded properly and people aren't relying on food banks. Labour needs to position itself as the patriotic party, and paint the Tories as the traitors who have been secretly selling us out to foreign business interests the whole time. Which is easy, because it's true.
Immigration will not be an issue at the next election. Neo-liberal consensus, remember? Don't be surprised if the media narrative changes from "keep all those filthy Poles out!" to "look how much talent we're wasting by not letting Indians in!"
>>27073 >Immigration will not be an issue at the next election. Neo-liberal consensus, remember? Don't be surprised if the media narrative changes from "keep all those filthy Poles out!" to "look how much talent we're wasting by not letting Indians in!"
Anti-immigration sentiment was opportunistically seized upon by the powerful interests that wanted us out of the EU, but if you think leaving the EU will see any reduction on immigration, you're living in cloud cuckoo land. Our economy is neo-liberal and run by neo-liberals, so immigration is never going anywhere.
A neo-liberal economy requires immigration to keep labour cheap, increase the taxpayer base to counter the ageing population, among a myriad of other reasons. There's a legitimate anti-immigration argument to be made from a left socialist position, as well as a less legitimate one to be made from the far right. But to the neo-liberal centre, immigration is a deliberate feature of the system.
If you're someone who still thinks immigration is a social issue, rather than an entirely economic one, you need to wake up.
>>27076 I'm not sure >>27073 is being cynical enough. If I was The Sun, The Mail, or The Rt. Hon. Member for Uxbridge and South Ruislip I wouldn't be saying "look how much talent we're wasting by not letting Indians in", I'd talk a lot about the need for "Commonwealth Immigration" while waving a Canadian flag, or in front-page articles accompanied by a big photoshop of a bloke with a funny hat hopping into Heathrow on a Kangaroo.
>>27075 >but if you think leaving the EU will see any reduction on immigration, you're living in cloud cuckoo land.
There's been some right nutcases on Twitter who voted leave, now going off about how them immigrants are still coming in but somehow it's labours fault, as is Boris inviting the Chinese. The mind boggles.
>>27085 I'm not convinced - I remember a phrase that goes something like, you don't pay them to have sex with you, you pay for them to do it and then fuck off afterwards.
Yeah, they'd be outdoorsy prostitutes - they'd help me gather firewood and that. I might have to pay more, but I wouldn't just want two romanian lasses lounging about in the car waiting for me to do the tent poles. They'd be involved. And they'd call me Ray Mears all weekend.
>>27095 The problem is you would have to keep them secret because its an affair. So it would be more like Bear Grylls where you have them camped behind a hill and you'd occasionally wonder over when you get stuck so your German mothers can get the WD40 out or refill your glass of piss.
This sounds like a lot of hard work if you ask me. I think I'd rather do a Farage and end up locked in a pub where at least there's no risk of a paparazzi spotting me pinching a loaf.
>>27134 I got tired of running around looking for pallets I can use and now have a couple of builders who drop them off whenever they've finished with them.
I'm find this concept of multiple re-infections a bit frightening - surely it means that herd immunity is almost impossible to get, and then how could a vaccine work? Particularly given that six strains of covid19 have been identified.
>>27137 >surely it means that herd immunity is almost impossible to get
It does, where've you been lad? The herd immunity angle has always been complete bullshit. The struggles for the vaccine have just highlighted the fact that everything should have stayed shut down longer and we should have stricter restrictions now.
A nut glut of nuts due to pubs being closed and far lower air travel has sent prices tumbling to multiyear lows. Mintec, the food retail consultancy, said its benchmark prices for cashews and almonds had been falling since the start of the year as restaurants and hotels closed their doors.
Cashew prices sank to their lowest level since Mintec’s records began in 2011, especially as religious festivities and weddings in India were cancelled to contain the spread of Covid-19, curbing demand for nuts used in curries.
In Europe, there was less demand for almonds, hazelnuts, cashews and Brazil nuts as ingredients for on-the-go snacks such as cereal bars with fewer workers commuting to offices.
>>27133 >The world and his dog have been passing the time doing DIY.
I don't get it. Is this just from the weekends being free? Surely not that many people are off work.
>>27137 You're being much too pessimistic. If you collect all 6 strains and the rare shiny then the world really is your oyster. Just imagine all the empty resorts you could go to or how you could hold the world ransom for your antibodies.
>>27139 I've yet to see any price crunch at the supermarket. If anything, I'm shelling out more for peanut butter than ever before.
