PTK
Paul Kegan
The burden is on you, not me. You made the claim, you have to prove it.
New Labour government - legislative agenda
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PTK
Paul Kegan
Those who claim that they expected the Winter Fuel Allowance to be cut are making an assertion that they cannot prove.
A statement such as “a Starmer government will make cuts in public expenditure that will have a negative impact on the working class” is not a prediction that the Winter Fuel Allowance will be cut. If it was, then I, too, could claim that I predicted this cut.
The cut in the Winter Fuel Allowance is actually contrary to the electoral interests of the Starmer regime. It could be cited as an example of the metaphor “cutting your nose to spite your face”. The Labour Party will lose votes because of this. The abolition of the universal Winter Fuel Allowance will haunt it for some years. This is why those who have some understanding of these things were shocked by the move.
Certain people may in their own minds consider themselves to be members of a self-defined vanguard of the proletariat, and like to claim that they foresaw the cut in the Winter Fuel Allowance, but they did not.
A statement such as “a Starmer government will make cuts in public expenditure that will have a negative impact on the working class” is not a prediction that the Winter Fuel Allowance will be cut. If it was, then I, too, could claim that I predicted this cut.
The cut in the Winter Fuel Allowance is actually contrary to the electoral interests of the Starmer regime. It could be cited as an example of the metaphor “cutting your nose to spite your face”. The Labour Party will lose votes because of this. The abolition of the universal Winter Fuel Allowance will haunt it for some years. This is why those who have some understanding of these things were shocked by the move.
Certain people may in their own minds consider themselves to be members of a self-defined vanguard of the proletariat, and like to claim that they foresaw the cut in the Winter Fuel Allowance, but they did not.
teqniq
DisMembered
What is proposed does seem to resolve a bunch of the issues with PFI
PTK
Paul Kegan
It does not resolve the problem that public money will be siphoned into private bank accounts.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
InArduisFouette
Well-Known Member
I think peopel are also put off this by the whole Prescription pre-payment thing , where the Gammon Press breathlessly related the stories of peopel being 'forced' to pay 80 gbp a month for NHS prescriptions, when even the most curosry bit of research shows that in addition to the extensive list of exemptions , there is hlp for a proprtion of people on low incomes and for anyone subject to prescription charges there remains the the option of the PPC
InArduisFouette
Well-Known Member
PFI like some of the early Ambulance PTS contracts that were privatised shafted the NHS and LAs because quite simply the nHS and the LAs didn;t understand the basics of reading of contract or what the contract actually meant
I’m sure.
“Under the model proposed by the FGF, government departments or individual mayoral authorities would take an equity stake in joint investment vehicles, operations would not be outsourced, and investors would be obliged to hire and train local workers during construction. Annual payments to contractors would be capped”
Will resolve most of the issues, the reality is that the state doesn’t have the capability to do this any more, id rather it did - but it doesn’t and if labour want to get anything done by the next election - they’ll need to work with people who can build stuff.
PTK
Paul Kegan
There is a private "magic money tree", but not a state one? These schemes will in the end cost the state more than ordinary borrowing by the state, as did PFI in the past. But the "fiscal rules" will be adhered to, because it will be "off balance sheet". It would be cheaper for the state to borrow the money directly, as it was at the time of Blair's PFI. This new-style PFI is just another way of borrowing money, but at greater cost to the state in the long run.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Sorry, why not?
Last I looked, governments could borrow money at a lower interest rate than any private entity. That hasn't changed, and it remains the most compelling reason why the state continues to have the greatest capability to do this.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Yes, it is exactly this. The state can demonstrate that it isn't borrowing by getting the private sector to borrow on its behalf, resulting in a net loss to the state over the period of the contracts, which in many cases are 20+ years.
It's an accounting trick, one that costs money. One that makes already rich people richer.
PTK
Paul Kegan
“My financial institution has loads of spare money, that I am prepared to invest in building new public infrastructure, at great profit to me and my confederates.”
“If you don’t invest it somewhere, will you become homeless and penniless?”
“Er, no.”
“Will you still live in your lovely house, own your lovely cars, and have enough money to live a comfortable life until you die?”
“Er, yes”.
“Then you don’t really need to invest that spare money, do you?”
“Er—“
“— and you would not suffer if the state confiscated it, would you?”
“Um, no, but, but that’s my money, that I worked hard for.”
“Did you work harder than a steel worker?”
“Well, no.”
“Or a member of the crew of a fishing trawler?”
“Well no, obviously, but—”
“You sat in a nice warm, air-conditioned office, pressing buttons and talking on the telephone?”
“Yes, I did, but it was nerve-wracking at times. Watching the exchange rates and the share prices going up and down, often suddenly and without warning.”
“But not at all dangerous? You did not risk life and limb?”
“Well of course not”.
“Yet your total income from your salary, your bonuses, your dividends, et cetera is far, far higher than the income of a steel worker or a member of the crew of a fishing trawler.”
“Well, I am responsible for the generation of wealth. The City is one of the main contributors to the Gross National Product.”
“The labour of the steel workers provides us with steel, the labour of the fishing crews provides us with fish, but what does your labour actually produce?”
“Well, I don’t care what you say. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves want me to invest in building public infrastructure and reaping my just reward."
“If you don’t invest it somewhere, will you become homeless and penniless?”
“Er, no.”
“Will you still live in your lovely house, own your lovely cars, and have enough money to live a comfortable life until you die?”
“Er, yes”.
“Then you don’t really need to invest that spare money, do you?”
“Er—“
“— and you would not suffer if the state confiscated it, would you?”
“Um, no, but, but that’s my money, that I worked hard for.”
“Did you work harder than a steel worker?”
“Well, no.”
“Or a member of the crew of a fishing trawler?”
“Well no, obviously, but—”
“You sat in a nice warm, air-conditioned office, pressing buttons and talking on the telephone?”
“Yes, I did, but it was nerve-wracking at times. Watching the exchange rates and the share prices going up and down, often suddenly and without warning.”
“But not at all dangerous? You did not risk life and limb?”
“Well of course not”.
“Yet your total income from your salary, your bonuses, your dividends, et cetera is far, far higher than the income of a steel worker or a member of the crew of a fishing trawler.”
“Well, I am responsible for the generation of wealth. The City is one of the main contributors to the Gross National Product.”
“The labour of the steel workers provides us with steel, the labour of the fishing crews provides us with fish, but what does your labour actually produce?”
“Well, I don’t care what you say. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves want me to invest in building public infrastructure and reaping my just reward."
Cid
Proper break this time
I'm assuming this is the policy document (well, suggestion):
www.futuregovernanceforum.co.uk
Rebuilding the Nation 03: Infrastructure Investment Partnerships - Future Governance Forum
Delivering the UK's infrastructure ambitions with a new model of public-private partnerships
www.futuregovernanceforum.co.uk
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Very entertaining, but a few problems there.
The kinds of institutions you're talking about are not investing their own money but that of their clients. Who may be wealthy individuals in the case of wealth funds; or they may be the likes of you and me in the case of pension funds.
No investment, no income. No income, no clients. And no pensions.
And let's get real: no government is going to be confiscating money from institutions or their clients in the way you seem to be suggesting. The consequence of that would be that the markets (which matter, because that's where the government borrows the money it doesn't raise in tax) will never do business with you again. (Hello Truss 2.0.) No. Not happening.
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PTK
Paul Kegan
Infrastructure in the past was built by private contractors, financed by the state.
PTK
Paul Kegan
So, it is not necessary for the government to use this new form of Private Fiance Initiative.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
When you say "capability to build" you mean doing the procurement & managing the contracts rather than actually doing the construction work, right?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
We're probably talking a bit past one another in that case. The bit I most object to is the private finance part. It is basically dishonest and a means to funnel wealth towards the rich.
Taking construction companies into the public sector is a good thought, although there are other sectors I would nationalise first.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
I'm assuming this is the policy document (well, suggestion):
Rebuilding the Nation 03: Infrastructure Investment Partnerships - Future Governance Forum
Delivering the UK's infrastructure ambitions with a new model of public-private partnerships
It mentions the question of why not just borrow -
And seems to evade it somewhat - "some will argue" - it doesn't really address the question of whether the cost of borrowing privately is more expensive than borrowing publicly.
But it then goes on to say what you might expect, that PFI is more efficient due to the financial incentives involved and dismisses failures as instances of bad implementation rather than evidence that the basic principle is flawed.
two sheds
Least noticed poster 2007
I wouldn't put it past them soon, but I did think today that Labour's been there for more than 45 days so we do have to say they've passed Liz Truss' tenure without bankrupting the country.
And there's always this (quoted so you don't have to click the link). This one's £10,000 up in the last year on "some" of his prop-er-ties and expects rents to rise 20pc over the next five years. He doesn't look happy, though, and he's going to have to drastically downsize his port-fo-lio (selling 35 of his 65 rental prop-er-ties) and look for an actual job
https://www.tele graph.co.uk/money/property/buy-to-let/selling-35-rental-homes-labour-not-only-one/
And there's always this (quoted so you don't have to click the link). This one's £10,000 up in the last year on "some" of his prop-er-ties and expects rents to rise 20pc over the next five years. He doesn't look happy, though, and he's going to have to drastically downsize his port-fo-lio (selling 35 of his 65 rental prop-er-ties) and look for an actual job
David Coughlin is only keeping hold his properties with the best tenants and energy performance ratings Paul Cooper
David Coughlin has been a landlord for two decades, but now aged 54, he has decided it’s time to drastically downsize his portfolio and switch careers.
For him, the decision to downsize has been four years in the making. First it was the introduction of Section 24, which abolished mortgage tax relief, then high interest rates, and now the Renters’ Rights Bill – dubbed the biggest overhaul of rental law in over 30 years.
Mr Coughlin said: “It’s all making people think it’s a good time to get out of the market. Some of my properties have gone up by £10,000 in value over the past year, and Savills expects rents to rise 20pc over the next five years – it’s still an attractive market.
“But very few long-standing portfolio landlords are keen to keep all their private rental properties occupied. This is because it is about to become much more difficult to evict a tenant if you want to sell your property.”
Under the new bill, tenants will be able to miss three months’ rent before a landlord can take action to possess their property, a change from the current two-month threshold.
Section 21, otherwise known as “no-fault” evictions, will also be banned completely by next summer. This means landlords will need to rely on Section 8 for evictions, a piece of legislation beleaguered by court delays which reached 55 weeks on average last year.
https://www.tele graph.co.uk/money/property/buy-to-let/selling-35-rental-homes-labour-not-only-one/
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zedr
new but not *that* new
Thanks for sharing. Both those sections read like they were written by someone who knows PFI is bad value for money but has been asked to write a puff piece about it regardless.
two sheds
Least noticed poster 2007
Indeed, which was a point I was making. Although I’d have thought that most now read papers online – or get much of their information from social media.
Yes I nearly went back and deleted that sentence. Although we’d differ on how to reach the goal I’d have thought we agree on the sort of society we want to see: a reverse of the huge financial imbalance between rich and poor, a much fairer distribution of resources, and equal access to education, healthcare and the like.
In theory perhaps but hardly in practice. It suggests that, as an extreme, Trump's politics are as correct anyone else's, which would itself be a nonsense.
For me political systems can be judged as more “correct, more natural or more logical” from their results. That means analyzing how successful they are at addressing peoples’ most important needs. That is why I like the PWSC: it improved conditions for the great majority of people in the UK post war. As evidenced by the number of people who had access to free health care and education, social housing and social security, and jobs with sick pay and pensions and much greater job security.
Full employment for me is essential – that diagram I drew a while ago showing that unemployment was uniquely low and stable during the PWSC – constant between 4 and 5% so eliminating the boom and bust that we’ve been subject to before and since, so virtually eliminating the huge costs of unemployment, giving people the feeling that they contribute to and have a stake in society, and removing the divisive factor of people in work resisting their tax money going to people without work. While incidentally paying off the large post-war national debt. That’s what I’d like to see when comparing the different socialist and communist governments – how successful they are/were in addressing those improvements to society.
That seems clearly more correct, more natural and more logical than the politics either before or since. There was of course poverty and wages were low but so were rents and other living expenses. It was hugely better for the great majority of people than what we have now, and so a better political system.
Similar with a political party’s stance on immigration. The right wing view seems to be generally against immigration with the further right wing people go the more agin’ it they are. Conversely left wing tends to be in favour. To make a decision means studying the real effects and the benefits of immigration. For example deciding on the basis that the great majority of immigration is not ‘illegal immigrants’ that the right bangs on about but care workers, nurses and students. A much smaller number are refugees, and looking again at the data would show how many refugees have been caused by the west destabilizing the Middle East and its knock-on effects. A correct approach would be analyze who the immigrants/refugees are, where they come from, and why they had to leave their homes. Then try to address those causes – that would be a more ‘correct’ political approach.
Do you have any evidence for that? Particularly the recent move rightwards seems driven in large part by the right wing media and by social media. The right has huge financial resources that just aren’t available on the left, and has a willingness to just invent and spread lies like wildfire would also seem to be part of their ascendency over the left: ignoring that would seem just as big a mistake. Along with the different factions of the left each having their own political theory with a seeming inability to agree on anything.
I’d have thought if nothing else the left should be able to agree on an evidence based approach, and that instead concentrating on the different approaches to political theory actually hinders that.
two sheds
Least noticed poster 2007
I'm not sure it does.
Mail 700,000
Mail on Sunday 580,000
Express 139,000
Sunday Express 123,000
Sunday Mail 47,000
Telegraph 250,000
Sundy Telegraph 250,000
Sun 1,000,000
That gives only around 3,000,000 for the newspapers themselves – although of course a lot are viewing them online. And a lot of tories this time will I think just not have bothered voting.
Newspaper ABCs: Sunday People sees biggest print decline in July
Chz
Stark Raving Sane
I meant as relative to the "left" papers.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
I don't really agree. I think they may be written by someone who cannot see clear evidence that either route is necessarily better.
redsquirrel
This Machine Kills Progressives
Why? What is the standard against which correctness is to be judged? One might reasonably describe Trump's politics as incoherent, contradictory and stupid but that is different than saying they are in some fundamental sense incorrect, in the same way as intelligent design is incorrect or the belief that a cube is has 12 vertices is incorrect.
But this is a subjective viewpoint of your own. For much of human history political philosophies were not judged in that way - it was regarded as correct that some have more power, more wealth and more everything that others - because they of their birthright or because it was best for society overall that those that 'deserve' the most have the most. Hobbes being a prime exponent of the latter.
Again against what criteria? Why is a more equal society better or more correct than an unequal one? There is no logical reason to suppose so. You, and I, might prefer it but it is ultimately a subjective opinion. There is no science of politics. Attempts to 'prove' the correct ethical and political positions have done nothing more than reveal the proponents own preferences.
As has already been pointed out most people do not read a paper, there is some correlation between paper readership and voting but it is not deterministic (as this polling shows), and as I already said if your theory held then how did socialist parties every begin in the first place when all the press was against them.
Culture is one area of the class struggle and it will be influenced by labour and influence labour, but labour is an active force constantly creating new arenas and self-organising. The working class are not just some passive body whose politics are dictated to it by the media.
This is going in the direction of the silliness on the thread in theory where it has been claimed that the right are driven by emotion while the left are rational. It's a liberal canard.
And what evidence anyway? You have those prats like Torsten Bell and Hans Rosling taking an evidence based approach to prove that liberal capitalism is the best possible politics. Frankly anyone who says they are taking an evidenced based approach to politics I immediately mark down as suspect.
Well besides the fact that I like discussing and reading political philosophy, and posting on U75 is entertainment - understanding the fundamental principles of political philosophies can help one understand where the conflicts might occur and alliances might be made. Ellen Mieksins Wood's A Social History of Western Political Thought provides a class based analysis of the development of political thought which contrasts with the liberal analysis, and that understanding can be used to inform political organising in the present. I don't refuse to organise with liberals, hell I spend a lot of my time doing so, but understanding the chasm separating their politics from mine helps to see where organisation is possible and where it is not.
The frequent cries of 'ideological purity' are 99% of the time actually noting of the sort, but a genuine conflict arising from different political philosophies.
EDIT: To expand on the last part. The liberal basis that your politics rests on has a conflict of left vs right, a conflict of values. But class politics (my politics) is based not on the values people hold, but on their interests, most crucially their relationship to the means of production. Workers may hold conservative views but they are still workers, my bosses are 'left wing' but they are still my bosses, still capital.
And understanding the different basis upon which those different political philosophies rest then helps explains why different approaches are taking to political organising, despite the similarity of some 'wants'.
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