OneGuyFromBarlick

I listened to the BoE excuses why they had to put the interest rate up. They have accepted what they have done will drive the GDP down. A recession lasting at least a year. No explanation how reducing GDP and therefore the resultant taxes will improve the overall economy. Shoving prices up while keeping wages down will not improve business turnover. Also there is the threat of higher unemployment taking more money out of circulation and increasing unemployment payments creating another drain on government spending. Andrew Bailey's fall back position was if he didn't do anything then 'things' could get worse. In effect if he didn't respond to the money markets they would repeat the government bond fiasco and force him into a U-turn. It would appear that we were only hours away from a collapse of the Pension fund markets. The BoE and our Tory government have lost control of the economy. In short 12 years of Tory policy plus Liz Truss's disastrous extreme trickle down experiment not to mention turning our backs on EU trade has left the UK in the weakest position imaginable. Eventually, another aspiration, number crunchers will be pointing at charts and graphs showing inflation at 2% and GDP back to pre-covid days quietly ignoring that people are poorer and services like the NHS have virtually disappeared.
Meanwhile we have another two weeks of softening up propaganda before the 'I told you so' budget.

Tripps wrote: ↑31 Oct 2022, 10:23

Stanley wrote: ↑31 Oct 2022, 04:38 1000 channel crossers a day,

Is that the new PC description now? It could loosely include Sue and Bob.

Today Brittany ferries announced that Brexit has severely reduced the number of people crossing the channel ( on their boats) . Perhaps they could offer more favourable rates than the little boats with a return trip guaranteed if immigration is refused

Have a look at THIS. the BBC account of what Mark Carney thinks Brexit will do for us. Funny how we amateurs were right all the way along and the politicians were wrong.

Its amazing how 'difficult trade-offs' and tough decisions always hit the poorest the hardest. Deciding whether to have eating or heating is a tough decision for anyone to make. Making the choice whether to go to the Bahamas or Spain may appear difficult but on the scale of 'trade offs' its negligible. Here we are with the £ Stirling sinking towards parity with the dollar and our Central Banks doing their damnedest to see that it gets there. Chancellor Hunt is cutting back on investments and infrastructure which is the very opposite of Keynesian economics that pulled the world out of the great depression. Having got the UK to the top of the laughingstock league the right-wingers are determined to keep us there. The big companies in which I include the energy companies and the private utilities should be told to use their profits on investment rather than dividends and bonuses or have them taken away in taxes or better still privatised. Of course it will never happen because its not the Conservative way.

Spot on Ken as usual. If you were to ask what are the worst things the government could be doing I would say look at the aftermath of WW1, what the government did and what was the effect you will see essentially everything they are doing now. Chasing 'sound money', ignoring advice from their own appointees to nationalise the energy industry (At that time it was coal), ignoring legitimate wage claims from the unions (That led to the General Strike of 1926) and starving the growing welfare state of funding by cuts and introducing savage means tests.
John Maynard Keynes had written his report on the economic consequences of the Versailles Treaty and was ridiculed and ignored. As you say. in the end his advice had to be followed to finance the Defence of the Realm in 1939.
From the evidence it would appear that none of the present leaders knows or understands this. Therefore we are destined to follow the same route that gave us 'The Hungry Thirties' in the 20th century. It will be the 21st century 'Hungry Thirties' this time.

I note this morning that Sunak is making the best of a bad job (Having been forced into attending COP27) by banging on about the importance of renewables. This from a man in charge of a system which has been notorious for neglecting any serious energy policy provision for decades.
See THIS BBC account of why high UK energy bills were decades in the making. It is littered with sentences like 'David Cameron's government felt "there was not a need to intervene to support more gas storage".' I hasten to say that Labour governments were just as remiss.
A classic example of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Question is are we any clearer now than we were for all those years? I don't think so... Where is the investment into tidal power? Totally reliable. Let's start from there instead of paying the French to build another obsolete nuclear power station.
Later..... Sunak is under attack for appointing Gavin Williamson as minister when he had been warned of his extreme email habits. See THIS BBC report.....

The pre budget propaganda bandwagon is in full flow. Loads of speculative comment of how much Sunak intends to hit the rich taking £Billions from industry, cutting back on gold plated vanity projects in fact anything the media can dream up. Meanwhile No10 is keeping quiet, as they should do prior any budget only making vague references to 'the Manifesto'. Labour on their part is trying to get a 'Yes, No' answer to the triple lock manifesto promise on pensions. A vote to be taken this tuesday on whether they will keep this promise. This vote is seen by the Tories as political mischief making. Voting against it may not go down very well with their aging constituents. A vote for it may be reducing Sunak's / Hunt's options to trim it down a bit until better times return. Another long grass promise. At least Starmer is rattling their cage a bit.

See THIS BBC Reality check on the forthcoming cuts. Some interesting facts in there....
Meanwhile Sunak bangs on with bleeding obvious advice to boost his green credentials and Williamson gets more flak about his obscene emails. Not a lot of domestic or foreign governance going on, everything is in limbo until Hunt give us the bad news. Is it a week on Thursday?

Drip, drip, drip, The propaganda continues to brainwash everyone that cuts to public spending are the only answer. Supporting this claim is the money spent on covid lockdown and the war in Ukraine being the basic driving forces behind our move to austerity. The world is moving into recession making trade more difficult. America is pushing up their interest rates to curb their own inflation pressures but at the same time making the $Dollar stronger against the £Stirling. All this is true but the UK did something that the rest of the world is shaking its head about. In 2016 the UK voted to leave the Common market. This marked a turning point in our GDP trajectory. Claimed to be the will of the People'. Theresa May started the ball rolling with the UK out of the market but still with an outstanding agreement with Northern Ireland. Then came Boris 2019 with 'Get Brexit Done' and a bodged NI agreement. Brexit was done and the will of the people fulfilled followed by a steeper downward slope for the GDP. Seven years later the full affect of this self arm is becoming clear. Mark Carney and other independent authorities are saying Brexit was a mistake built on misinformation, I would say lies and fantasies. When choosing a government the 'will of the people' is reassessed every 5 years. Surely after 7 years the will of the people should be tested again but this time with its affects clear for everyone to see. People should not be ashamed to admit that after being lied to about the mythical benefits they made the wrong decision.

"Mark Carney and other independent authorities are saying Brexit was a mistake built on misinformation, I would say lies and fantasies"
And I would agree with you Ken.....

See THIS for the big political decision of the day. Plans to build a new 'royal yacht' have been scrapped.
That's the only decision I can find in the political news.....

See THIS for the big political decision of the day. Plans to build a new 'royal yacht' have been scrapped.

Well that's our tough decision taken to keep the economy on an even keel now its your turn. Perhaps some staff redundancies in the schools to help with their budgets. Pay rises even at half the 10% cost of living rise will only make the long term situation worse. Asking for more money will only stoke up inflation that's why we have to cut out this rot before it gets started. Of course we have a lot of sympathy for those who are finding it hard to manage and for that reason we have arrange to have 'clapping' groups outside each of the main food banks. Inequality is again on the rise where billionaires distort the the balance of incomes. To minimise this distortion those with incomes above £1Million a year will be paced in a 'Premier' league so that a true picture of the lower second league workers can be made this will become the preferred method of inequality measurement. To balance these common sense actions the good news is that energy prices appear to be falling with the possibility that at the end of the price cap in April they will only rise by another £1200 which since it will take affect in the summer months they will hardly be felt. Other than the above minor adjustments there is nothing on the horizon to worry your heads about.

As usual you have it about right Ken I reckon. The Premier League to bring clarity to lower incomes is a brilliant idea. So brilliant I could easily imagine J Hunt doing it!

Sir Gavin Williamson has resigned. I think he was a 'dead cat' for Suella Braverman, and he certainly kept her off the front pages for a while, but it all got a bit out of hand. I thought he might last until tomorrow.

I thiink that makes it three steppings back/resignations. It's looking serious for him now - he may have to wait six months now to get back into the Cabinet. More likely he'll get a peerage.

Opposition Day: the State Pension triple lock
Division 87: held on 8 November 2022 at 16:01
218
Ayes
0
Noes

Looks like none of the Conservatives voted at all. Gives Sunak the option to ignore it as a none event.

Gavin Williamson.... how did he ever get into the Cabinet anyway? He'd already proved he was a deadleg and all he has done since is confirm that. I think you're right David, distraction tactics to protect another deadleg. I see she is to visit Albania.... That'll be an interesting trip, have a look at THIS article in the Albanian Daily News......
As for the Triple Lock.... I think you're right Ken, political manoeuvring because Sunak knows if he had allowed his MPs to vote they would have supported retention of the lock. Rightly or wrongly they believe that loss of the 'grey vote' would be catastrophic. They could well be right.....

As a conspiracy expert I tend to keep 99% of my speculative thoughts to myself. Good thing did I hear someone say.
Starting with SIR Gavin Williamson. My thoughts was he was brought into cabinet as a spy to give Sunak a feed back of what was being said outside the official meetings also he would act as a damper on Cabinet discussions making sure that dissenters held back from fear of being 'exposed'.
Braverman is a different kettle of fish. A fish rots from the head. She is being tolerated because with the ERG backing sacking her could bring Sunak down on the next major vote (Budget). Once the budget is out of the way she may get the push but anything after that would put her in a position of Prime Minister in waiting. ie: a clone of Trump.
Nothing would give me greater pleasure that to be wrong.

Of no consequence at all - but I hardly recognised Penny Mordaunt at PMQ's. Since her very disappointing run for the leadership, she seems to have had a reverse makeover, now wears glasses, and is going (quite successfully) for the school ma'am look.

David, it worked for Thatcher!
Looking at the piste this morning for UK political news I have to report that there is none. Unless of course you count Sunak saying in Parliament that 'he regretted Williamson's job ending in resignation'. God knows why he should be surprised, every post he has been in has ended in either sacking or resignation.
The piece of political writing that interested me most was THIS. Trump has had a bad night which is good news for me. It's bad enough that our politics are in chaos, having another spell of the megalomaniac Trump in post would be too much!

I never realised there are no wild monkeys in Australia. From this I suppose that if they could get Matt Hancock annoyed it could be counted as part of the trade deal and another Brexit advantage.
Tory Minister Gillian Keegan implies the increase in food bank usage is because of some temporary breakdown in peoples access to food. Its difficult to imagine thousands of ovens breaking down at once but people not having enough money is a more realistic reason. Top marks for inventive language.
The BoE think that if shoppers can't afford to buy something the answer is to put interest rates up so that they can buy even less of it. What was the name of the book Charles Lutwidge Dodgson wrote?
The shortage of foreign labour is affecting the UK's ability to grown its own food resulting in shortages and an increased level of imports. The reason for limiting foreign labour has now become obvious. When a lettuce can beat a PM we need to import more lettuces.
Much speculation about if a general election is round the corner. The current polls are showing that if they were held it now the Conservatives would suffer a complete wipe out but by delaying it for a year it would be even worse. The answer is to let Sunak and Hunt dig an economic hole so deep that nobody can climb out of it on the premise that things couldn't get worse so we can safely vote Tory again.

I was struck by a farmer saying that he was afraid that as UK producers tried to negotiate better deals to counteract the increased input costs they face, the supermarkets would opt for imported produce instead on the grounds that it is their duty to protect the consumer. This would result in farmers ceasing to grow the crops but use the land for other incomes such as solar panels or tree planting for carbon credits.
This is where I think it should get political. It is the duty of the supermarkets to avoid doing anything that damages our farmers. High time we started to protect them as a national asset and not leave them hanging in the wind to be destroyed by 'The Market'.
Problem is that politicians only understand politics (And sometimes not even that!) and have no concept of what is entailed in producing food and caring for land. Whichever opposition party takes up the farmer's cause seriously and protects them will be quids in in terms of support from the voters. Some of us remember rationing and we are very close to needing that again. The number of farmers not planting for next year is frightening.

GDP is down for the quarter July to Sept: A scapegoat must be found. Up pops King Charles III. its all his fault with his extra bank holiday. Queen Elizabeth II couldn't help dying but giving people holidays is a choice he could have avoided. GDP is one of those mystery measurements that is possibly only understood by experts and even then it depends on what they decide to include in the measurement. Obviously the first to consider is Inflation included or is it adjusted out. Then there are several other factors that could be included to give what appears to be the best guess at what's happening. What is becoming obvious is by comparison the UK isn't recovering from Covid or coping with the Ukrainian/Russian war as other comparable countries. Of course we will bounce back but it may take 50 years. Got to look on the bright side.

PS Kwarteng is now blaming Truss for the budget they both agreed on.

The thing that bugs me Ken is that the GDP calculations are based on nothing more substantial than estimates and they all have a built in margin of error which lately is almost always more than the shock horror figure that is presented to us representing growth. This is how the government have managed to avoid declaring a recession even though it has been obvious for a while that this is actually what is happening. Many people are going to find out why the 1930s are characterised as 'The Hungry Thirties'.
Thanks to Private Eye for reminding me that when Sunak was campaigning for Brexit he said that £20bn was the amount we would 'immediately save' on leaving the EU. The OBR has assessed the long run annual cost of leaving the EU as £80bn. Reassuring to have evidence of such prowess in assessing the economy..... or not.
I see Hancock is getting emotional in I'm a Celebrity..... (LINK) My heart bleeds for him.....

The average 'healthy' GDP for the UK should be between 2.5 and 3.5%. this gives a steady expansion without any serious problems. We (UK) is now at minus - 0.2%. for the last quarter, The glass half full media see this as only a minor dip in GDP. where actually the 'average' over a quarter should be plus + 0.7% giving a total under performance of nearly 1%. All this manipulation of GDP figures means nothing in the real world where food prices have risen 15%. Gas & Electricity approaching 100%. Rents by 15%+. Petrol by 30% depending on the chosen starting point. On and on it goes while wages have stagnated at around 5% for those at the bottom end. What of the future? Tough decisions. Eye watering cuts to services. Higher taxes. = austerity.
The flip side so we are told is that they may cut back on some of the things in the pipeline that were going to make the situation worse. So as a treat we only get 10 lashes instead of 12.

The treatment of Matt Hancock reminds me of the two minute hate from 1984

The political purpose of the Two Minutes Hate is to allow the citizens of UK to vent their existential anguish and personal hatreds towards politically expedient enemies: Hancock and the enemy superstate of the moment. In re-directing the members' subconscious feelings away from the Party's government of the UK, and towards non-existent external enemies, the Party minimises thoughtcrime and the consequent, subversive behaviours of thoughtcriminals.[2]

I am not watching the programme, and would not do so even if paid, but just reacting to the press coverage that I see.