Page 58 of 298

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Mon Aug 13, 2018 10:12 pm
by Lex-Man
Vermilion wrote:
Rex Kramer wrote:
KK wrote:

twitter.com/georgegalloway/status/1029051384191246336


It's the Twitter equivalent of the cat/buttered toast thing from Hitchhikers.


People actually still pay attention to George Galloway?


I cancelled his hospital appointment once and he went on the news saying it was a Tory plot to undermine his health. He was very nice on the phone though.

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2018 8:32 am
by Moggy
From The S*n's letter pages:

Image

:lol: :fp:

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2018 11:21 am
by KK
BBC News wrote:UK unemployment at lowest since 1975

UK unemployment fell by 65,000 to 1.36 million in three months to June - the lowest for more than 40 years, official figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show.

Image

They also show a rise in productivity, but a slowdown in wage growth.

Wages, excluding bonuses, grew by 2.7% in the three months to June, compared with a year ago.

The ONS figures also showed the number of European Union nationals working in the UK fell by a record amount.

The fall was the largest annual amount since records began in 1997. It UK unemployment at lowest since 1975 continues a trend seen since the 2016 Brexit vote.

That contrasted with a rise in the number of non-EU nationals working in the UK to 1.27 million - 74,000 more than a year earlier.

The CBI said the size of the UK workforce was shrinking at the same time as vacancies for skills and labour were growing.

Matthew Percival, CBI head of employment, said the government needed to guarantee that EU workers could continue to work even in a "no-deal" Brexit scenario.

'Economically inactive'

The unemployment rate fell to 4% in the quarter to June. That was the lowest since February 1975 and better than the figure expected by economists.

The drop came despite a smaller-than-expected 42,000 increase in the number of jobs created over the three-month period.

On productivity, the ONS also said output per hour worked was up by 1.5% - the biggest rise since late 2016.

The official figures also showed 104,000 people who were employed on "zero-hours" contracts, which do not guarantee a set number of hours per week, left such work. That left 780,000 people with those conditions as their main job.

It also said the number of people aged 16 to 64 who were not working, looking for work or available to work - what is known as "economically inactive" - increased by 77,000 from the first quarter of the year.


Interest rates

Earlier this month, the Bank of England raised interest rates for only the second time in 10 years, as it sought to manage inflation amid signs of a strengthening UK economy.

However, Suren Thiru, head of economics at the British Chambers of Commerce, said this now looked to have been a premature move.

"Achieving sustained increases in wage growth remains a key challenge, with sluggish productivity, underemployment and the myriad of high upfront business costs weighing down on pay settlements," he said.

"As such, there remains precious little sign that wage growth is set to take off - undermining a key assumption behind the Monetary Policy Committee's recent decision to raise rates."

Analysis:
Andy Verity, economics correspondent

Here's something economists have thought for decades that they know for sure: that if unemployment keeps getting lower, wages will improve. For years, the economy's been rudely ignoring the economists' theory, with wages sagging even as the unemployment rate hits fresh lows.

But recently, reality's looked just a little more willing to conform to economic predictions. Pay rises (excluding bonuses) averaged 2.7% in the year to the end of June - higher than the official inflation number of 2.4% (but lower than the 3.4% rise in the old-style Retail Prices Index used to calculate rises in rail fares).

Judging by the unemployment rate dropping to 4.0% - its lowest since February 1975 - that coincided with an apparently super-tight labour market, meaning lots of jobs available for fewer people to fill them.

And there's a key factor making the labour market tighter: a net outflow of EU nationals working in the UK. In the second quarter of the year, the number of EU nationals was 2.28 million on the Office for National Statistics' estimates - down by 86,000. That's the biggest fall in 21 years.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-45181079

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2018 11:33 am
by Lex-Man
Hasn't the way unemployment is measured massively changed since the 70's? They're comparing Apples to Oranges.

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2018 11:36 am
by DML
With nearly a million people on zero hours contracts those stats are very hard to take seriously.

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2018 11:39 am
by Cheeky Devlin
DML wrote:With nearly a million people on zero hours contracts those stats are very hard to take seriously.

Yeah those were the figures I was looking for and they didn't disappoint.

Load of utter bollocks that someone who "might" get a couple of hours a week is considered employed.

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2018 11:42 am
by Tafdolphin
"Unemployment has reached almost 0% since the introduction of indentured servitude!"

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2018 11:47 am
by KK
Even if you added the vast majority of those on zero hours, you'd still have a great unemployment rate though. In comparison it was well over 3 million in the early 80s and 90s (10% ish). At the most pessimistic level, this is as good as the Blair years. Wages however, no.

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2018 11:59 am
by Winckle
KK wrote:Even if you added the vast majority of those on zero hours, you'd still have a great unemployment rate though. In comparison it was well over 3 million in the early 80s and 90s (10% ish). At the most pessimistic level, this is as good as the Blair years. Wages however, no.

People are hugely underemployed though, it's not a success story.

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2018 12:13 pm
by KK
The ONS has it pegged at 2.8 million.

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2018 1:03 pm
by OrangeRKN
It'd be nice to see a similar graph of only full time employment and only part time employment, and also a graph of average wage adjusted for inflation against time.

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Tue Aug 14, 2018 1:51 pm
by Jenuall
Wage rises being pegged at 2.7% seems quite high to me as well, most people I know are still looking at year on year pay reductions in real terms at the moment.

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Wed Aug 15, 2018 12:17 am
by Meep
The problem is terrible productivity because businesses are employing hordes of people to do tasks on low wages instead of investing in better equipment, systems and automation. France, for example, has worse unemployment but overall better productivity and better jobs/working conditions.

Full employment is great in theory but personally I would be better to have higher unemployment if that were the cost of modernising things more, which is probably better in the long term. I would prefer an economic situation were we had decent welfare for those who are unemployed and support for creating good jobs that pay for that welfare; rather than the promise that absolutely everyone can have a job no matter how shitty.

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Wed Aug 15, 2018 8:22 am
by captain red dog
So this Corbyn story won't die. I have seen an article he apparently wrote in the Morning Star where he admits attending a service for the Munich terrorists.

I backed him in the last two elections, but I can't back him further. His avoidance of properly answering the issue is telling, and attending that service is far more than just out reach in the interests of peace.

Its also sad that his inevitable replacement will more than likely push the party back to the right.

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Wed Aug 15, 2018 8:28 am
by Moggy
captain red dog wrote:So this Corbyn story won't die. I have seen an article he apparently wrote in the Morning Star where he admits attending a service for the Munich terrorists.

I backed him in the last two elections, but I can't back him further. His avoidance of properly answering the issue is telling, and attending that service is far more than just out reach in the interests of peace.

Its also sad that his inevitable replacement will more than likely push the party back to the right.


I think you are correct that after Corbyn the Labour party will shift towards the right. But that doesn’t mean they have to be right wing/centrist, Corbyn is pretty far left after all.

Unless the grass roots of Labour turn on him, Corbyn isn’t going anywhere (which includes Number 10 ;) ) any time soon though.

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Wed Aug 15, 2018 8:58 am
by Vermilion
The only way Labour can claw back any respectability is if they ditch the current leadership and return to centrist politics.

It's a ridiculous situation we have right now, the Tory party's incompetence and infighting have reached insane levels yet there simply isn't a credible opposition offering a realistic alternative.

Labour have (to use a phrase once used to describe another party) been taken over by fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists, and as such, are completely unelectable.

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Wed Aug 15, 2018 8:58 am
by Winckle
Corbyn isn't that far left. For me the important thing is getting the party's executive committee under the control of those on the left, and then altering the leadership rules to allow a candidate to be nominated with 5% of MPs rather than 10%.

People often think that the left wing membership is a "cult of Corbyn", and that might be true of some, but the reason most of us don't want Corbyn to stand down and trigger a leadership contest is that the PLP will likely lock out any left wing MP from getting 10% nominations, and not give the membership a choice of a left wing candidate.

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Wed Aug 15, 2018 9:11 am
by That
Winckle wrote:Corbyn isn't that far left. For me the important thing is getting the party's executive committee under the control of those on the left, and then altering the leadership rules to allow a candidate to be nominated with 5% of MPs rather than 10%.

People often think that the left wing membership is a "cult of Corbyn", and that might be true of some, but the reason most of us don't want Corbyn to stand down and trigger a leadership contest is that the PLP will likely lock out any left wing MP from getting 10% nominations, and not give the membership a choice of a left wing candidate.

This is a really interesting window into Labour's internals, thanks for posting it. Who do you hope might be nominated with that 5% rule, if there's a leadership contest?

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Wed Aug 15, 2018 9:12 am
by Winckle
Karl wrote:
Winckle wrote:Corbyn isn't that far left. For me the important thing is getting the party's executive committee under the control of those on the left, and then altering the leadership rules to allow a candidate to be nominated with 5% of MPs rather than 10%.

People often think that the left wing membership is a "cult of Corbyn", and that might be true of some, but the reason most of us don't want Corbyn to stand down and trigger a leadership contest is that the PLP will likely lock out any left wing MP from getting 10% nominations, and not give the membership a choice of a left wing candidate.

This is a really interesting window into Labour's internals, thanks for posting it. Who do you hope might be nominated with that 5% rule, if there's a leadership contest?

McDonnell, Rayner, or Thornberry.

Re: Politics Thread 5

Posted: Wed Aug 15, 2018 10:19 am
by Preezy
Corbyn continues to do his absolute best to remain utterly unelectable. I simply cannot vote for this man.