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it was soul-destroying watching him compromise his principals in the pursuit of what he thought would win him votes
This is exactly what the numbers say though - the middle ground wins votes.
I’m changing my mind about Andy Burnham… always thought he was an empty weathervane of a politician
I've always admired how tenacious he was in getting the Hillsborough inquiry. It simply wouldn't have happened without the constant pressure he applied
I also think he was very shrewd in extricating himself from the Corbyn car crash, and Westminster's loss was definitely Manchester's gain. He's been quietly effective in the job.
At the moment he's doing a great job of making himself a right royal PITA for the government. It does feel like we're got someone with some clout and ability fighting our corner against a government that doesn't give a **** about us. Obviously, they can't ignore him when he's making so much noise. He throws the term 'leveling up' in at every available opportunity, which must wind Boris up.
We'll have to wait and see what Rishi actually announces. With anything this lot do, it gets filed under 'I'll believe it when I see it'
He’s been quietly effective in the job.
He'd be a lot more effective if it wasn't for that king size p**** Richard Leese obstructing him at every turn (or so I hear). I heard a while ago that relations between them are not good, which is a good enough reason for me to like him 🙂
And now the mother of all u-turns. A very welcome one, but how many have already lost their jobs because of the uncertainty and dithering? Turns out Sunak is cut from the same cloth as Boris after all.
The WhatsApp group for my old employer has just exploded due to this news of the furlough scheme being extended. Bosses that are still there have popped on saying if they knew this was going to happen our redundancy could have been pushed back with the hope of reduced numbers. You can guess how this has gone down! 6000 jobs at £30k a year and the 6 depots that go with them have been lost for no reason other than a politician not looking at the bigger picture. *****.
The frustration and anger must be palpable reluctantjumper... really feel for everyone effected. There will be thousands more as well. Labour have been pushing for this announcement for months now, it's a real shame that this government keeps acting only once it is too late.
Yep being reactive is hopeless when the damage has been done. They completely lack a vision.
So the announcement is help only for those businesses told to close. Presumably if your business or workplace is allowed to open but supplies goods or services to those closed businesses you're on your own? Say if all the pubs and restaurants are told to close, they get financial help. But what about the businesses that supply the food and drink, do they get help or are they told No because they are allowed to trade. The fact that all their customers are closed is brushed over?
Taking a bit of heart that this doesn't change the situation with my old workplace, we'd never have been on the closure list. If we were there would have to be bigger issues than a pandemic to worry about!
"All this spending will mean some hard decisions will have to be taken" When will someone call them out on this BS?
After all the news today something struck me about Boris's demeanour in that he looked like the penny had finally dropped. Not just on the difficulties of suppressing the virus, but on the economic front. He said months ago that another lockdown would be catastrophic for the economy, and much more so than the first, and I don't think he was lying. Well here we are, and he looked like he'd seen a ghost.
Back in April in an attempt to be transparent the bosses at my firm released some research they'd commissioned on the economic outlook and its impact on the business. They had modelled 4 scenarios, a V-shaped recovery, a U shaped one with a more extended recession (which they thought most likely), a 30s style depression, and then the doomsday scenario of economic collapse. The last one was described as being caused by repeated lockdowns causing a chain reaction of collapsing businesses, banks, and currencies. So if we couldn't prevent a second lockdown, who's to say we can prevent a third in the spring or a 4th next autumn, and what will be left after?
That second lockdown (or the same as what we has earlier in the year) is a very real possibility and he knows it. If we do go into one it will destroy so many lives it's hard to think about it.
I'm resigning myself to the fact that if these current measures don't slow the virus down rapidly then I'll be staring at a long time unemployed or at best in a crap job, probably part time, that doesn't bring in enough to pay the bills. My personal plan is to hold out until Christmas looking for new permanent work somewhere, if I don't find it I'll terminate the tenancy on my flat and move back home with my parents. That will give me the flexibility to either retrain, find part time work to slow the drain on my savings and give me the option of moving anywhere in the country where there is work that will pay my living costs. This is one of the few times I'm actually happy to be renting and not have a mortgage!
johnson is now living out his own personal nightmare created by little old him; he didn't introduce the virus to the UK but, other than that, he completely owns all of the problems resulting from his and his government's decisions on covid and brexit.
His inadequacy, incompetence and lying are on full public display every time he opens his mouth.
Mr popularity is now increasingly reviled, laughed at and is barely tolerated by swathes of tory MPs.
He has now realised that neither he nor any of his clown circus - and I'm now including Sunak - have the ability to lead at a time of national crisis.
The fragility of the UK is well and truly exposed; he and his various diktats are generally ignored; a ground down police force are under-resourced and disinclined to enforce the
ever changing regulations; shattered relationship with the EU; rising infection rate; Nightingale 'hospitals' re-opening; multiple lost opportunities; every reason to believe there will be a high death toll over next 6 months.
Trade deals? No, I can't see them either.
I absolutely despise him for what he's inflicted on the country.
Is he the worst PM in parliamentary history?
No wonder he looks like he needs a drink - or maybe he looks like that because of the drink...
Dead man walking - but for how long?
reluctantjumper
Full MemberThat second lockdown (or the same as what we has earlier in the year) is a very real possibility and he knows it. If we do go into one it will destroy so many lives it’s hard to think about it.
Unsure. I think at the moment, the financial/economic/cultural impact is ironically a lot like the virus- incredibly bad, but not quite deadly enough. So we're still approaching it exactly like we did the financial crisis- let's do as little as we can, disrupt things as little as we can, and then put things back how they were as much as we can. And anything that can't be easily saved or put back we just go, meh, TINA.
But it doesn't have to get a lot worse, for that to absolutely stop working. I mean, it doesn't really work now, but it's not open and shut enough. People can still delude themselves into thinking old solutions work, and they can definitely be misled into thinking it's true.
Capitalism is a pretty incredible thing, and I often think that really the only thing that can dent it these days, is its greatest enemy- capitalism. It might very well turn out that the longer term good of the nation is served by a proper reset now, rather than the usual state of constant sustainable survivable dysfunction.
I really don't want to have to live through a real financial collapse. But I also don't want to live through another half century of poisonous financial stagnation and built-in equality with things getting more and more into the rut. If I live through the proper collapse now, maybe it means my kids if I have any get to live in the better world that follows.. Without a real shake, we could easily just keep doing what we're doing, forever. The world gets richer, practically everyone gets poorer, and real critical issues- like global warming, and pandemics- get mishandled because they don't fit nicely into the algorithm
I really don’t want to have to live through a real financial collapse. But I also don’t want to live through another half century of poisonous financial stagnation and built-in equality with things getting more and more into the rut. If I live through the proper collapse now, maybe it means my kids if I have any get to live in the better world that follows.. Without a real shake, we could easily just keep doing what we’re doing, forever. The world gets richer, practically everyone gets poorer, and real critical issues- like global warming, and pandemics- get mishandled because they don’t fit nicely into the algorithm
The cynic in me (which is most of me) suspects that all a financial collapse will achieve is richer rich, poorer poor, and an even bleaker future.
The collapse in investment long pre-dated CV but this episode will see an acceleration of big business gobbling up the competition, money cascading over landlords and builders, more insecure employment and housing, falling wage rates, unemployment, austerity and privatisation whilst they spaff taxpayers' money on their mates for future rewards. CV has just put Tory policies on speed and they'll be quite chuffed with the abstention of the opposition. There will be a rush on trussed Turkey Twizzlers and White Lightning this Christmas.
Meanwhile they aim to cloud people's vision with The Proms, Marxism in the classroom, statues, poppies, scousers, netting refugees, identity politics, patriotic bunting, cancelling culture and maybe a murder on Corrie and another narcissist on the Archers. You have been warned.
The cynic in me (which is most of me) suspects that all a financial collapse will achieve is richer rich, poorer poor, and an even bleaker future.
Nothing good will come from an economic collapse. To paraphrase Michael Foot, the rich will look after themselves as they always do (and they're doing an awful lot of it right now), and everyone else will be left to fight it out in a world where they have no savings or income, and all the things we take for granted become more scarce or disappear completely. Civil society has extremely shallow foundations, and we're more exposed to its collapse now than ever before.
I put this on the Coronovirus thread, but it's probably more appropriate here.
Honest Bob has drawn the short straw this morning and gives a full indication of what financial support the people of Liverpool who’ve just had their jobs closed down can expect from the government
https://twitter.com/KayBurley/status/1315904028333703168?s=20
And of course, the businesses and jobs not 'directly' closed by the government's new measures will not even be entitled to that.
And they wonder why Andy Burnham won't be bullied into closing everything in greater Manchester?
They've made it pretty clear now that there isn't going to be any more financial aid for the peasantry who continue to have their incomes devastated by covid and the government's incompetent reaction to it. 'The Market' will be left to decide our fates.
Someone more cynical than me might suggest that it would be terribly convenient to have huge-scale unemployment and millions of desperate people once this lot are free of EU employment law in a couple of months
It's not cynicism at all, it's been much written about by eg Marx, Wilkinson, Klein, it's the destructive forces of capitalism.
Someone more cynical than me might suggest that it would be terribly convenient to have huge-scale unemployment and millions of desperate people once this lot are free of EU employment law in a couple of months
That may well be their thinking, but they're not in control of events. They're going to have much bigger problems to deal with than how to take advantage of all this available cheap labour. Whether Boris and Sunak like it or not, if they can't prevent future lockdowns they're going to have to step in and underwrite economic activity because the alternative is widespread public disorder. The economic pain is only just beginning to kick in, and when it accelerates so will the anger. It's not just the virus which spreads exponentially.
The collapse in investment long pre-dated CV but this episode will see an acceleration of big business gobbling up the competition, money cascading over landlords and builders, more insecure employment and housing, falling wage rates, unemployment, austerity and privatisation whilst they spaff taxpayers’ money on their mates for future rewards. CV has just put Tory policies on speed and they’ll be quite chuffed with the abstention of the opposition.
Rentier Capitalism.
https://www.bennettinstitute.cam.ac.uk/blog/rentier-capitalism-uk-case/
Good article!
Another Tory Minister - Mrs Doubtfire Theresa Coffey - is asked the same question by Kay Burley as Honest Bob yesterday:
could you live on the £5.84 an hour that many people will now be surviving on under tier 3 restrictions imposed by the government.
No answer again, obviously, but 'some' people 'may' be eligible for universal credit
https://twitter.com/SkyNews/status/1316266673180160000?s=20
Followed that link greentricky and it led to a pay walled site. I presume you were trying to be ironic, encouraging us to track the link only to find no trace of information.
What I think you meant to say is that the government has funneled 8 billion pounds to their mates and assorted Tory donors who have no relevant experience but a track record of abject failure in any of their other endeavours.
Just don't make the mistake of calling the government incompetent. What they're doing is deliberate.
inky, £8 billions is a massive under-statement.
Government performance is a melange of incompetence and deliberate actions - those who benefit do so as a result of deliberate decisions; for the rest of us, we're at the whim of ever-changing decisions.
I'm now off to resume sticking pins into my johnson voodoo doll - hope they transmit direct to him.
The article I was linking to:
If ever you wanted to know what could go wrong with paying people to dig holes in the ground and then fill them in, look no further than England’s coronavirus test and trace system.
The idea behind a crude Keynesian fiscal stimulus such as we’re seeing is that it does not matter much what government spends the public’s money on. That cash will end up as people’s income, which they will spend. It then becomes someone else’s income and multiplies the original public expenditure significantly to ease a nation itself out of a metaphorical economic hole.
The test, trace and isolate programme was introduced in England in May. It was expected to bring huge returns to the economy, with the Treasury allocating £12bn to it this year, comparable to what the government spends on nursery and university education. The promise made by Matt Hancock, health secretary, was that it “will help us keep this virus under control while carefully and safely lifting the lockdown nationally”.
This was not one of the speculative moonshots the prime minister’s team are so hopeful will transform the economy. Instead, it was a supposedly a careful investment of 0.6 per cent of UK national income with huge returns all but guaranteed. The service would allow the economy to reopen safely, emerge from a Covid-19-induced more than 20 per cent drop in output, and limit pernicious long-term economic scarring.
Not only would the government spending form the income of employees in the test and tracing system, it would also enable many more people to resume their past livelihoods, generating returns far in excess of the cost. If it contributed to a recovery worth 6 percentage points of national income, a tenfold return would have been achieved in a matter of months.
The problem has been that the money was not spent well. Test and trace has been mired in crises since birth. This autumn, it has failed to deliver sufficient tests, been slow in informing people they have tested positive and allowed a spreadsheet error to miss almost 16,000 positive cases. Trust has evaporated to the extent that the UK’s scientific advisory group has assessed it was having at best a “marginal impact” on transmission of the virus.
There is a strong case to go further and say the £12bn has so far had a negative rate of return. By allowing people to believe the nation had built a world-class system, social distancing slipped, the virus spread and the country is again thinking about local or national lockdowns, with inevitable severe economic costs.
How governments spend money matters. As Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, said this week, “there is scope for sustained public investment, but it does have to be on projects that earn a rate of return and [our] history is quite mixed on that front”.
Latest coronavirus news
Follow FT's live coverage and analysis of the global pandemic and the rapidly evolving economic crisis here.
In the wider field of economics, an increasingly fashionable view is that governments should use fiscal policy and heavy borrowing to run the economy hot so as to use all available resources and minimise unemployment. The only downside, according to schools of thought such as modern monetary theory, is a bit of possible inflation, which can easily be tamed.
The lesson from British public-sector investment disasters, including the Humber Bridge, advanced gas-cooled nuclear reactors and the NHS electronic patient record system, is that the growth-enhancing promises of investment projects are often overstated and multipliers might be very small.
What test and trace has added to the picture is that if government gets it wrong, returns and multipliers can be negative. In other words, if you’re going to turn on the public spending taps, make sure you get it right or you will end up with a horrible mess.
This was just posted up of King Street, right in the middle of Manchester city centre at 8am this morning. Completely deserted. On a normal day, this street would be full of people
https://twitter.com/RedPed70/status/1317005060128317441?s=20
It's easy to see why Andy Burnham is resisting Tier 3. This is after 10 weeks of Tier 2. I don't see how any of those businesses with premises in the city centre can survive much more of this
Disaster capitalism is about making cash from chaos. This mob are beyond that, they're not looking to make cash from chaos they're looking to take cash from chaos. It's got nothing to do with capitalism, it's theft and corruption, pure and simple.
Binners,
I put my mind in 80's mode some time ago, I know it's going to be worse than that, this time there isn't too much fighting on the dance floor because there is no dance floor.
EDIT
On the plus side, living in central Manchester I've rather enjoyed cycling on the empty streets and enjoying the cleaner air this last six months! Lots of conflicted feelings though, watching the 'Manctopian' dream crumble is painfull, on the one hand I hate what they've done to my city, turning it into a 'New Suburbia' but on the other hand, seeing peoples lives and businesses thrown into turmoil is even more depressing.
Not getting much traction with the £50k digital project manager jobs I'm applying for. Just chucked in application in for a NHS contact tracer - seems cushy.
Any tips of scoring a customs agent job? Heard there's 50k of them going. Am very much willing to steal, rob and be bribed.
Well we've got part two of the Boris/Rishi good cop/bad cop routine
They need to do something or the business failures over the winter are going to be enormous
Lets see what they come up with
binners - yet again, nothing for you and many others like you.
I'm a realist Frank. I'm completely resigned to it now. To the point where I think the entire industry may be finished, for the foreseeable future, at least. As well as many others. I'm lucky in that I was in a position to diversify into something else that used a similar skill set.
Many aren't so lucky. By next March every sound or lighting engineer, graphic designer, photographer, events co-ordinator or cameraman is going to be driving an Amazon van or stacking shelves. Or, like Fatima the ballerina, we could work in cyber. If we're lucky.
We were deemed 'acceptable collateral damage' in March and that was never going to change
By next March every sound or lighting engineer, graphic designer, photographer, events co-ordinator or cameraman is going to be driving an Amazon van or stacking shelves. Or, like Fatima the ballerina, we could work in cyber. If we’re lucky.
That's leads me to wonder about something I've been curious about - how much content do the BBC/Sky/streaming services have in the pipeline, vs the speed at which new content can be produced with current restrictions etc. Realise that likely there is post-production work going on on a lot of stuff that was shot pre-March, but this is a pipeline that needs to be kept fed I guess.
Forgetting all the other terrible stuff going on, lockdown has been made more tolerable by some interesting series to watch.
Ignoring the all getting together on Zoom stuff, how do you keep the media content consumption beast fed? Animation carried out via home-working? The snarky answer I guess is something around a load of that backlog of movies that haven't come out this year being released direct onto media services, or re-cut into mini-series (like a reverse Das Boot).
The thing is the long term implications too.
You don't just have an on/off switch. These industries (because they are industries) have their own co-dependent ecosystems. Most of the staff are freelance. So they'll have had little, if any, work since March, and have been excluded from all government support, so have had no income at all other than universal credit.
So it's quite an assumption to think that next year you can just say 'ok everybody, we're going to start filming/recording/rehearsals again, can you all come back to work?'
To which the answer in most cases will be "I would do, but I've got all these packages to deliver".
My sister is saying exactly that for her Theatre. They may well be able to open in the spring but there will be no shows coming through as they haven't been rehearsing, the technical staff will all be unavailable as they will have to have taken other jobs and a lot of the companies that supply things like the sets, lighting and sound equipment will have gone bust. So anything to do with the arts, Tv etc is going to take a long time to get up and running again once they are allowed to resume working.
By next March every sound or lighting engineer, graphic designer, photographer, events co-ordinator or cameraman is going to be driving an Amazon van or stacking shelves.
Puts hand up.
I'll be living at my mum's with my partner and three kids for the foreseeable future. And I'm probably one of the lucky ones.
ooh ooh ooh....puts hand up too
Musician here so didn't even make it on to Binners list. Everyone knows it's a hobby not a job though yeah.....
I'm due to start as a delivery driver next Friday. As above, I'm probably one of the lucky ones.
What do you mean by March, I’ve been a binman since June. Not much call for any of our kit, just running a few zoom meetings. Hopefully enough work to keep the company solvent but not to actually pay anyone.
Hoy thread reboot!
So, todays development is that even the 'Red Wall' Tory MPs can see the writing on the wall and are pointing it out
Much was made of the ‘Red Wall’ Tory victories, but it was against the most hopeless labour leadership ever seen, and it was hardly some thumping landslide. Those MP’s are sat on paper-thin majorities. My own new Tory MP’s majority is 100 votes. He’s signed the letter despite being a rabid Brexiteer, Boris cheerleader and utter *!
What they will be painfully aware of is that our economy is about to go into freefall. Every day that goes by with no plan to get the north out of lockdown means more business failures, more job losses, more misery and hopelessness, more kids needing free school meals. The compensation being offered for this by central government is pitiful and amounts to little more than loose change. It’s a drop in the ocean compared to what’s really required to see us through a winter under lockdown. And everyone up here thinks (knows) this will be a full winter under lockdown. We’re not stupid.
These Tory MPs haven’t suddenly developed social consciences. They’re Tory’s after all. This is basic, naked self-interest. They all have tiny majorities and they want to keep their seats on the all-expenses-paid gravy train. They can see what we can all see from up here. That, far from Levelling-up, Boris and his Westminster chums seem happy to sit back and let a re-run of the 1980’s rip through northern communities again over a long bleak winter, while the South remains unaffected, as is has done up until now. Just to reiterate: ‘The North’ has been under Tier 2 restrictions since July. We only ever came out of lockdown for a couple of weeks.
They don’t give a flying * about us. Even their own MP’s know it.
Either that or those in power really are so economically illiterate that they completely fail to see the true magnitude of what is about to happen here
I suspect it's a mix of the two
Not strictly corona but part of the general cluster of imminent events:
Great news for consumers and bike shops.
Speculation: the government 'blends' Serco into the NHS, like the 'behaviour unit' into the civil service. In a trade deal any US firm can buy into Serco, result, they have further advanced the flogging of the NHS.
I'm hearing about proposed 'regrading' of some ancillary staff positions in the NHS to reduce their pay. Don't be surprised by anything.
I was in Manchester on Friday and Saturday. Friday it was dead in the business areas, shocking to see. Saturdy, only Market Street area had any numbers and it was a quarter of usual foot fall.
MrsF signed on today, furlough not extended for her. Another 1 to the many millions unemployed.
I was in Manchester on Friday and Saturday.
I've not been back since March apart from one day in June when I rode through the city centre on my bike. It was like a ghost town, and yes was shocking to see when you consider how many jobs are dependent on it. I don't know how all the hospitality and smaller retail businesses survived the first lockdown so surely they won't survive this one?
I'm even more convinced now than I was a few months ago that the era of big cities as a place for retail and business is over. There's still a role for them as a social space but without the footfall that business and retail provide they won't be able to support the range of food, drink and entertainment outlets so its something of a chicken-egg problem. For the likes of Manchester I can't see anything other than terminal decline and decay.
I don’t know how all the hospitality and smaller retail businesses survived the first lockdown so surely they won’t survive this one?
Having quite a few mates who run small independent hospitality businesses, they know they can't weather this. Some are trying to innovate and do whatever they can, but the games surely up now. They won't last the winter. Remember that in the north they've been in Tier 2 since July, which has meant operating at 25% capacity anyway. Those sums don't add up. With this just piling further misery on top of that.
You think Manchester City Centre will suffer? Wait until you see what the average small-town high street is going to look like by next March. Particularly as December is where they make a big chunk of their annual income. There's going to be nothing left. They might as well board them all up now.