ronmcd wrote:Clusterbourach seems to be gaining some traction. Not really strong enough.

jamest wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:

jamest wrote:... the notion that the NHS is not going to exist nor that you will not have access to medical care after The Conservatives won on Thursday/Friday, is utterly ludicrous. I mean, you might be forgetting this but we've already had 9 years of a Tory government in a financially crippled Britain/World.

The NHS has been crippled by the last 9 years of Tory government!

No, it's been crippled by a Tory government that inherited debt to levels that have almost made this country bankrupt. Or do you think that the Conservatives imposed austerity upon its people for a laugh?

Thommo wrote:...the UK had a particularly high deficit through a combination of cyclical (as opposed to Keynesian counter-cyclical) borrowing increases...

jamest wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:

jamest wrote:... the notion that the NHS is not going to exist nor that you will not have access to medical care after The Conservatives won on Thursday/Friday, is utterly ludicrous. I mean, you might be forgetting this but we've already had 9 years of a Tory government in a financially crippled Britain/World.

The NHS has been crippled by the last 9 years of Tory government!

No, it's been crippled by a Tory government that inherited debt to levels that have almost made this country bankrupt. Or do you think that the Conservatives imposed austerity upon its people for a laugh?

It's a bit like waking up yourself and realising that you're thousands of pounds/dollars in debt and can no longer afford to pay the interest. What do you do? You make severe cuts in your own spending. At least, that's what most reasonable people do.

Austerity measures at national level have not helped regions to recover following the 2008 economic crisis, according to a new LSE study of the UK and other EU countries.
On the contrary, high public debt countries have been more successful in sheltering their regional economies, the research concludes.
Dr Riccardo Crescenzi and Dr Davide Luca of LSE’s Geography & Environment Department and Dr Simona Milio of LSE's European Institute mapped the impact of the crisis across the 27 EU member states on key performance indicators. They then explored the potential links between pre-crisis economic factors and post-crisis economic performance that may have exacerbated or mitigated the short-term contraction of the various regional economies.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/website-archive/ne ... study.aspx

The Institute of International Finance says austerity probably damages economies trying to recover from the great financial crisis.
Since 2008, GDP growth in the US has been 10% greater than in Europe, the IIF says. In terms of GDP growth per capita, the reduction was 5%. Fiscal tightening in Europe was the main difference.
Trend growth in the US was double what it was in Europe following the financial crisis, the IIF says. Prior to 2008, they had been the same.
"Fiscal austerity is a mistake," IIF Managing Director & Chief Economist Robin Brooks tells Business Insider.

https://www.businessinsider.com/austeri ... ?r=US&IR=T

Thommo wrote:

Hermit wrote:

Thommo wrote:...the UK had a particularly high deficit through a combination of cyclical (as opposed to Keynesian counter-cyclical) borrowing increases...

The above chart indicates a classically Keynesian process. Debt increased at a marked rate during the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 - 2010. The purse strings were opened to countervail the credit squeeze. The technical term for that I believe is "economic pump priming".

Not between 2002 and 2008, which is when the criticism applies. Labour changed policy in about 2001 following Gordon Brown's belief that he had ended the economic cycle, or "no more boom and bust" as he put it and the end of the 1997 manifesto commitment to stick to the previous government's spending plans.

What is now clear from the new solid black line (which has replaced the old view, which is the dotted black line) is that the 2008 crisis began rapidly with a very heavy initial decline in GDP that caught everyone by surprise in 2008, and which was more severe than other recessions - whose dates are noted. But what's also clear is that before Labour was out of office the recession was tracking towards recovery remarkably like 1973 and 1979.
The change came in early 2011 - when Labour's impact and policy was replaced by the austerity agenda of the Coalition. Suddenly the black line takes a remarkably different trajectory to the blue and red lines representing progress in 1973and 1979 and almost flat lines for a period before slowly creeping upwards.
And this was not because the Eurozone really hit a crisis in 2011. As Geoff shows, the ONS data does not support that view. Instead it is because of a massive shortage of investment levels precisely because of the austerity agenda in government and the rhetoric that discouraged business from investing.
The evidence is clear: Labour had the recovery under control in 2010. The Coalition delivered austerity and the result has been lower growth, a weak recovery, a loss of investment, a decline in capacity, the creation of low value work and low productivity and a mood of economic despair. And all that was chosen and was not inevitable. That's a massive legacy of poor decision making.

https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/201 ... one-graph/

Thommo wrote:
Yes, it definitely is. The criticism was that Labour borrowed too much by running a deficit in the period running up to the economic crash. Labour's borrowing plans were for about a 3-4% deficit, but the actual deficit spiked up by about a further 6-8%, which is why it hit double digits and the amount of debt rose so sharply in the following years as the rate of change slowly came back down.

The deficit is essentially the first order derivative of the debt graph (although not quite that one as it's normalised to GDP, although the shape is essentially the same), thus the gradient of the spike is contingent on the deficit.

Having shrunk by more than 6% between the first quarter of 2008 and the second quarter of 2009, the UK economy took five years to get back to the size it was before the recession.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/grossdom ... 2018-04-30

Thommo wrote:I didn't say or imply that it did.

A spike of +6% from -1 leads to a deficit of 5% though, whereas a spike of +6% from +3 leads to a deficit of 9%. The rate at which debt piles on, the gradient on the debt graph, is thus radically different. This affects how much action government needs to take, and how quickly.

Macroeconomic decisions don't take instantaneous effect, they accumulate over time and thus appear as larger effects down the line.

(Reuters) - British Prime Minister Boris Johnson won a thumping election victory last week on a campaign to "get Brexit done," but not before some wealthy donors to his Conservative Party quietly took steps to stay inside the European Union.
Cyprus government documents seen by Reuters show that Conservative Party donors have sought citizenship of the island, an EU member state, since Britain voted to leave the bloc in 2016.
They include billionaire Alan Howard, one of Britain's best-known hedge fund managers, and Jeremy Isaacs, the former head of Lehman Brothers for Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Cyprus' interior ministry recommended that both men's applications be approved, the government documents show.

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/e ... spartanntp

The UK has failed to pass on the details of 75,000 convictions of foreign criminals to their home EU countries and concealed the scandal for fear of damaging Britain’s reputation in Europe’s capitals, the Guardian can reveal.

European trust in the UK on security issues sank to a new low on Tuesday night after details emerged of the apparent cover-up, which prompted calls for an investigation in the UK and a warning from one senior MEP that a Brussels inquiry was inevitable.

The police national computer error, revealed in the minutes of a meeting at the criminal records office, went undetected for five years, during which one in three alerts on offenders – potentially including murderers and rapists – were not sent to EU member states.
Guardian Today: the headlines, the analysis, the debate - sent direct to you
Read more

Authorities in EU countries were not informed of the crimes committed, the sentences given to their nationals by UK courts or the risk the convicted criminals posed to the public.

Because the details were not passed on, dangerous offenders could have travelled back to their home countries without the normal notification to local authorities of their presence.

U.K. farm subsidies will require efforts to support public goods, such as recreation. PETER MULLIGAN/GETTY IMAGES
United Kingdom to embark on ‘agricultural revolution’ in break from EU farm subsidies
By Erik StokstadJan. 17, 2020 , 5:10 PM
After the United Kingdom leaves the European Union at the end of the month, it will sever ties with Europe’s farm subsidy policies—and to many researchers, that is a good thing. This week, the U.K. government proposed radical changes to £3 billion a year in agricultural spending that will focus the money on benefits to climate, ecosystems, and the public. “It’s dramatic and utterly critical,” says Dieter Helm, an economist at the University of Oxford. “This is an agricultural revolution.”
more
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/01 ... -subsidies

What's pissed me off has been how many so-called supporters of democracy were willing to undermine Brexit for their own personal needs/requirements.

jamest wrote:The importance of Brexit is that it's happened, which supports the importance of Western democracy.

What's pissed me off has been how many so-called supporters of democracy were willing to undermine Brexit for their own personal needs/requirements.

What's the point in having ANY political ideology if it all boils down to: "What's in it for ME?"

We might as well resort to the law of the jungle.

Seriously.

jamest wrote:The importance of Brexit is that it's happened, which supports the importance of Western democracy.

jamest wrote:
What's pissed me off has been how many so-called supporters of democracy were willing to undermine Brexit for their own personal needs/requirements.

Brexit: Price rises warning after chancellor vows EU rules divergence