Nick Clegg in growing a pair and actualy talking some sense shocker!!!

First off, let me be clear, I hate toffs and their upper middle class privileged snivelling little existences, whatever their political leanings. These ruling classes are like a disease to UK PLC. We need doors opened for anyone with the drive and ability to reach the top, not some chinless wonder from yet another mafia like dynasty! Down with the old boy network!

Clegg, let’s face it, he’s a naive as they come! Like so many modern day politicians, they have no idea what real life is like.

I heard he wants to impose a new inheritance tax. If that’s the case, the liberal party are finished.

Why? Because, like all political manovres, the only people hit hard without fail, regardless of which party is in power, are those who earn a shade or two above average. Including your typical middle ground liberal voter!

Misguidedly, socialists believe that people who earn around double the national average are rich, but they are not. Those caught in the middle ground are also the silent and passive majority who contribute a disproportionate amount in taxes, and due to means testing, will never receive any state support if they should run into difficulties. I am talking about people who have taken responsibility for their futures and saved some of their income over a long period of time. Due to their sheer numbers, this section of society are the cash cows for all political experiments. But I digress somewhat…

Over the last 25 years, house prices and the cost of living have rocketed. Lots of young people have gone and got degrees, worked hard and are out there making what most would consider to be a good wage. But the left wing’s politics of and jealousy are incredibly destructive! The fact is that these young people canot afford to get on the housing ladder and are merely passing their supposed wealth on to their landlords etc.. There are other young people, just as well educated, but who don’t have above average incomes. These people have an impossible challenge.

It is forecast that the younger generation will become increasingly disgruntled with the older population, who have benefitted from owning a home whilst watching house price inflation dwarf that of the official inflation figures. The increased taxes the young will bear to keep public sector and state pensions enriching the lives of the older people, who already seem to have all the money, will cause huge resentment.

Enter Clegg and his great idea to impose a new inheritance tax. The hardworking overburdened young will have been thinking about when they will eventually inherit from their parents, or family, believing that their lives will get a lot easier. With the Liberal’s new tax, they will get a lot less. They will feel like their just deserts are being stolen from them, redistributed to a bunch of unworthy feckless spongers and to pay for the inefficient and often pointless government schemes/initiatives etc etc. ultimately, they will no longer be the beneficiaries and that they will feel robbed. The last straw!

The Liberals could not be more out of touch with the people they need to keep on their side. They are a lost cause, clueless and ineffectual. Just like they have always been!

The democratic system isn’t working. We have too many people who aren’t contributing. We need free enterprise and as in the past, we need circumstances that enable and encourage small businesses to lead us out of recession. Red tape and taxes are the product of the public sector. The public sector is far too over bloated, far too many are employed by councils and government agencies. To reduce red tape and taxes, to grow our economy and become remotely competitive, we need a much reduced public sector.

We also need the the feckless benefit spongers to do some work too! If you promote growth at the grass roots level, people, not big corporations benefit. Perhaps even some of the unfortunate victims of the recession would find they have some job opportunities as well.

But before any of this, the charade that is going on in Europe over the single currency needs to play itself out. This uncertainty is what is killing any recovery.

JY – behind the sarcasm are many grains of truth. There were plenty of economists and bankers warning of the coming crisis. Go and read the Bank of Englands Financial Stability Reviews over the period. The nightmare was that these warnings were ignored even within the Bank of England. And Mervyn King is a man who is meant to have earned respect? At least people realise that Greenspan was at the root of this not the master of a new economic miracle.

But there are economists and economists – and my point is that many of the current political elite were schooled with the same economy frameworks. Hence the similarities in policies (behind the differing rhetoric), the failure to correctly diagnose the causes of the crisis and the subsequent failure to deal with it.

I agree with the Tory behaviour towards Prescott – making fun of people’s backgrounds is not really acceptable is it!!!??? 😉

like all political manovres, the only people hit hard without fail, regardless of which party is in power, are those who earn a shade or two above average. Including your typical middle ground liberal voter!

Perhaps the average liberal knows this but knwos they can afford to help the less well off becaus ethey have some morals?

socialists believe that people who earn around double the national average are rich, but they are not.

what % of one of the richest 7 countries in the world do you need to be in to be rich? iirc double the average is top 10% for an individual

The fact is that these young people canot afford to get on the housing ladder and are merely passing their supposed wealth on to their landlords

That will be left wing socilaist landlords depriving them of oportunity will it

I cant be arsed it’s a tirade and not a very well thought out one form the 1/3 I read do you then rant about benefits the public sector andf then big up business as our only possibel saviour?]Does thatcher get a mention …i bet you dont mention council house sales and how this affected the housing market or say anything bad about the tories despite them heading us back into recession with right wing free markey=t policies that are encouraging enterprise, giving tax cuts to the rich and shafting the publi sctor as if it is responsible for the excesses of the capitalist market.

Ia m tempted to out up Nicks comment when you ranted about immigration again

But there are economists and economists – and my point is that many of the current political elite were schooled with the same economy frameworks. Hence the similarities in policies (behind the differing rhetoric), the failure to correctly diagnose the causes of the crisis and the subsequent failure to deal with it.

dont disagree but I dont have as much “Faith” in economists as you do. Tbh the probelem lies in the market model and tinkering with it is pointless as it is corrupt …I think we may not have much common ground on that view

I agree with the Tory behaviour towards Prescott – making fun of people’s backgrounds is not really acceptable is it!!!???

Ah I see what you have done there and very clever, I will try and back pedal later 😉

my only issues with poish toffs is that they canno tundersatnd what iot is like for the majoirty of the population and it is difficult [ though no timpossibl;e] for them to represent well.
GO and his 11k winter holiday during a recession for example. as David Blunkett said to him when he was annoucing the public sectors cuts

“which one of the essential services do you think you will miss most”

They have never needed the sate/help so why should they respect it?

Poor cmd having to go to cornwall to appease the masses.

James Dyson is another worthy of mention for being a decent hard working honest British taxpayer.

Who moved his business to the Far East thus deprived 800 other honest British workers of a job and thus chance of paying tax?

Cough Offshore move of Mr Dyson

That’s a very entertaining polemic, Spongebob. My cup of tea has gone cold, while I read it and tried to fathom out what it meant. I don’t wish to appear rude, but it is full of stunning contradictions, such as espousing ‘free enterprise’, yet bemoaning the fact that so many young people are forced to rent off private landlords. Pouring vitriol on ‘benefit scroungers’, yet calling for cuts in the public sector, at a time when there aren’t sufficient alternative private sector jobs for these people to transfer to. Meaning they’d all end up unemployed. And an increased burden to the state. Which would have to then increase the public sector to deal with the increased demand.

The gross overinflation of the property market is largely a result of ideological greed; people wanting more than they actually need. Not content with simply having ‘enough’, they buy property with a view to making profit, to add to their incomes. Exercising their ‘free enterprise’ spirit. This coupled with the desire to own, to increase your economic status. To be bigger and more potent than you were.

I think it would be more useful to try to address why we have become so greedy, and look at ways of helping people feel more contented, than to attack everything that you think is to blame.

Junkyard – Member
dont disagree but I dont have as much “Faith” in economists as you do.

Faith in economists? One of my favourite economics books at the moment is Steve Keen’s Debinking Economics, so perhaps you can understand my responses to the insults that others used to throw my way!! Like many sciences, its gives us useful frameworks for understanding yesterday’s problems!

I agree with your comment about understanding other people. But then again, who really does understand others who live in completely different sectors of society? Oh, heck perceptions and bias again…..not a good subject for STW! Any way time for a ride now before the next band of rain!

I liked Will Huttons comment on the subject. Ask 3 economists and you’ll get 4 different opinions 😀

THM – suns out here too. And the forecast ain’t bad either. Have a good ride! Riding Tomorrow and Saturday, hopefully. 😀

So after all this have we found a painless way to magic up a pile of cash that pays of the national debt. Thought not, shame. Like a family we are really shouting about lack of money while not listening to each other. We all know it’s about money or the lack of it, do we have any real idea on how make some without adding to the national debt. 🙂

Like many sciences, its gives us useful frameworks for understanding yesterday’s problems!

This is my main objection to it. It is not a science and the fact economists think it is either startling arrogance or ignorance of what science is.
Scientific theory explains things, gives us predictability and allows us to manipulate things to achieve the outcomes we wish to get.

Economics falls some way short of all of these.

JY, that’s a trifle harsh IMO. Not sure any sciences genuinely pass your test. As an undergrad, many moons ago, you could study Econ in the arts and science faculty. Given that I have an MA, I tend to agree with your sympathies, but to a lesser extent! The bllx that is “rational expectations” was becoming very mainstream at the time and look where that got us. It felt like being in lectures on the Emperors New Clothes even then!!!

Of course, if we were smart, we should have used the subjects weaknesses to our advantage. Michael Porter became the highest paid academic in the world in the 1990s by basically relaxing the key assumptions of the new-classical theory of the firm. He was charging $100k an hour to give a lecture on his simple, yet effective five forces model. So if Harvard makes you that savvy, then perhaps there is scope for Ed Milliband yet.

(Binners, I hope your conditions are better than mine were tonight!)

Its just has been Nick Clegg shaking the biscuit tin to show he is still alive and taking a fat wage off the state, while being on holiday, it means absolutely NOTHING to most of the working classes and will probably send Daily mailers into a catatonic state of rage.

and its a god cover for pob rearrangening the exam results ,and the catholic church in scotlandshire have a petty little letter reading competion.

Basicly its not news as nothing will ever be allowed to change.

Here’s the one economic theory that’ll work for ya (“theory” because I can’t think if an insulting enough word for what economists dream up):

It’ll go boom. Bankers/traders/etc will **** it up. Then it’ll go bust. And the lower two thirds will get hit hardest rescuing them. Not to mention the world’s neediest. It’s broken. It doesn’t work. America is brightening its outlook this week. Why? **** house prices. They’ve just kicked off an world economic crisis because of a house price bubble which allowed crooks, conmen and shysters to sell mortgages to those they plainly knew couldn’t afford them. Hello? HELLO?

We need to try something different.

We won’t of course. But we need to.

If we need to try something new then what about not spend what we do not have. Domestically, socially and politically. We could try an old thing save up then buy.

Couldn’t be bothered to read the full thread, but had a chuckle when I saw the title!

Nick Clegg is as barkingly mad as they come; he wants to do this AND he’s opposed to the third runway at Heathrow.

What a nut-job!

They are all nut jobs, if you can’t do anything else be an MP. It’s the ultimate job for the hypocritical, support by the deluded. What gets me is that so many actually support their stupid out dated political arguments of the left and right, while these same politicians are trying be on the “middle ground” or even the “third way”.
It’s been a pity that this so called coalition has not done a little better, after all what we need at present is politicians that put personal (self interest) and party ideology to one side and work for the common good. First though they’d have to have the brain to figure that out. Have heard that it’s a blue moon tonight.

if you look at his ‘career’ before politics, it’ll go a long way toward explaining why we have such a bunch of useless halfwits as MPs.

Why can’t we get industry leaders and experts to run the country, not the usual idealogical academics who’ve as yet not done anything of use in their lives??

Ho-hum, it isn’t going to change anytime soon.

industry leaders

They rarely give a shit about anything other than industry. I can’t see industry leaders ever having introduced, say, a minimum wage. In fact, it was industry leaders that railed against it and had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the party when it was finally introduced.

Vince Cable used to be the financial Director of Shell, among other things, so has had plenty of real life experience. And if I remember rightly he was a lone voice in parliament issuing apocalyptic warnings about the economic miracle emperors new clothes that was the banking industry.

Of course he was ignored by everyone, as he wasn’t telling them what they wanted to hear. Whereas Bob Diamond and Mervyn King were/are.

He’s still being studiously ignored now, as they continue to listen to the same totally discredited, self-interested voices as if the whole crisis never happened. And shape policy accordingly around their narrow needs, to the profound detriment to the rest of us in the ‘real’ (unimportant) economy

It must be pre-conference, judging by the behaviour over the last 48hours. So Cable and Oakeshott plotting now against Clegg. Would you really want these kind of people in your team? Certainly not in the trenches. The Coalition could have been an interesting political experiment, but the amount of briefing and counter-briefing that is going on makes it look like another Tucker episode….wait a minute…?

Oakeshott’s business analogy is an interesting one – how many businesses would re-employ a worker who had been fired for fiddling their expenses? Why is this OK in politics?

always struck me that economics is very similar to ecology of all the branches of science. Both subjects are massively complex and will never be fully understood. In both we see things happening and then try and fit a theory to it, then when something looks the same we use the theory again but because its so complex it doesnt work. The other approach is to make the theories so simple they work when applied to the real world but are so simple that they are useless.

So Cable and Oakeshott plotting now against Clegg. Would you really want these kind of people in your team? Certainly not in the trenches.

An interesting comment from someone who constantly claims to be apolitical and castigates those who see things from a party political perspective.

It would appear that you put loyalty to the party and its leader above all other considerations after all.

Let’s face it teamhurtmore, you use the “above party politics” argument purely when it suits you, ie, when the Tories are seen as an embarrassment. Like a couple of other people on this thread.

E_L, really don’t see the need to personalise this, so will only respond to the general comments. This applies to all parties (so pls don’t ignore my comments about the Tories and Heathrow etc), it’s just that the LIb Dems seem to be taking centre stage over past 48 hours. Oh yes, and I am biased. I don’t trust Cable with a barge pole.

Loyalty? Well yes in a team you want your players facing the same way don’t you?!? At least someone like Balotelli scores goals for his own side occassionally.

[wasn’t Mark clear enough about new forum guidelines?]

The trouble with economic theories IMHO is that certain politicians, bankers and economists seem to view them akin to a religion. With themselves as the high priests. Mainly as it seems to always benefit them, whatever happens.

The whole Milton Friedman Chicago School economic model is now so utterly discredited its absolutely laughable. Yet they still not only cling to it, but advocate yet more extreme versions of it as the only solution. Trouble is, its the rest of us it impacts, and pick up the tab. Not its practitioners

They’re like those Japanese soldiers found in the jungle 40 years later, still thinking the wars going on. Only this time they’ve got nuclear weapons

A_A, a lot of truth in that! Also summed up in Goodhart’s Law.

Binners, I would add that it has been extremely unhelpful for debates to have been consistently centred around monetarism vs keynesianism as this has led to massive mis-understanding of both (especially the latter). This leads to false monetary vs fiscal policy type debates. The failing at the moment stems from a basic misundersatnding of (1) when different policies are more and less appropriate and (2) that monetary and fiscal policies work better in combination rather than in isolation. Its a pity that the current elite dominating politics, central banks and the IMF seem to have ignored this (although recent signs that the IMF is now modifying its orthodoxy to an extent) but as I said before most of them were schooled in exactly the same frameworks of analysis.

[wasn’t Mark clear enough about new forum guidelines?]

Well I missed the “new forum guidelines” which state that no one must disagree with teamhurtmore or expose his contradictory comments. How convenient for you.

Are you going to rely on that stroke from now on when you find yourself in a tight corner, or do you think you might manage something a bit more intellectually challenging ?

Hate to say this THM, but I think we’re in complete agreement on this.

Funny thing was that some politicians initial reaction to the banking crisis seemed like it was finally doing away with the divide, and using the best aspects of both systems, combined.

Of course as soon as the initial blind panic and meltdown had been averted (albeit at ridiculous cost to us) the a fore-mentioned politicians, bankers and economists promptly forgot all that and went straight back to business as usual

Depressing really. Whats that phrase about repeating the same exercise, but expecting different results? Because that’s the route we’re presently embarked upon. Ah, yes….. madness

No, like the majority (apparently) I prefer a forum that debates without personal attacks. But feel free to carry on if you want to chose to ignore recent advice (and the evidence from my posts). The mods can decide where their boundaries should be drawn.

binners – Member
Hate to say this THM, but I think we’re in complete agreement on this.

😉

…..debates without personal attacks

So exposing your contradictory comments amounts to a “personal attack” does it ?

You are clearly trying to personalise this in an attempt to divert attention away from the embarrassing fact that you have been caught out contradicting yourself.

IE, claiming that people should be above party politics and yet castigating Vince Cable for disloyalty to the party leader, with talk of “your team” and “trenches”.

Nice try attempting to get the mods to save you btw……”the mods can decide” lol 🙂

Your pathetic discussion above is a prime example of why Politics is a waste of time other than for ego-fluffing.

We need a benevolent dictatorship, none of this namby pamby pretence that people care about others. Life is the survival of you and your progeny. Nothing more, nothing less. Human or not.

Mountain biking is a nice distraction.

Let’s face it teamhurtmore, you use the “above party politics” argument purely when it suits you, ie, when the Tories are seen as an embarrassment. Like a couple of other people on this thread.

A bit like you’ve used the “I don’t vote Labour” line to distance yourself from them, but consistently tell us that they are the only answer to the evil tory masterplan… (whilst actually voting for their official mayoral candidate, repeatedly, after saying you wouldn’t)

There’s only one person on this thread making abusive comments about other posters Ernie, and its not THM

No, like the majority (apparently) I prefer a forum that debates without personal attacks.

THM – the reason you get personal attacks is the somewhat disingenuous nature of many of your posts.

You constantly claim to be apolitical and deride others for making arguments along party lines – yet it’s pretty obvious to many people where your sympathies lie. Why not just be honest about it?

Binners – Vince Cable was Cheif Economist at Shell. His has never been a finance director.

There’s only one person on this thread making abusive comments about other posters Ernie, and its not THM

people have a funny idea about the word abusive these days

none of this namby pamby pretence that people care about others. Life is the survival of you and your progeny. Nothing more, nothing less. Human or not.

Don’t project your own sociopathy onto everyone else please. Pretty much all of the best things in human history have been achieved through collaboration and co-operation.

E_L, really don’t see the need to personalise this,

Remind you of anyone THM ?

He is not beyond than the fact he is responding to you.

Does this also mean you will stop making references to TJ and how the mods have reacted recently as obviously you would not want to personalise this 😕

JY – I think this is becoming boring and would normally try to ignore, but you make a specific point that I will address. I have made no comment re any of the recent bans nor of any of the individuals involved. Perhaps after Prescott you were looking forward to a “touche” moment. If you can find any reference to comments re individuals and their bans, then you can enjoy the moment at my expense. But I am confident that this is not the case.

Mark has made his wishes for the future of STW very clear. IMO, E_L’s comments over-stepped the mark and I took (mild) offence to them. Frankly, I think reporting posts is a bit wet and sneaky, so I prefer to make the point openly in the thread and leave it at that. Ernie felt it appropriate to continue but I do not.

I see that Lord Ashdown has made similar comments to me this morning. Perhaps those who prefer to personalise things can direct their venom in his direction as well.

I hardly wish to continue the spat, but thm, I have read several references to TeeJ in posts by you, sometimes in threads to which he hasn’t even contributed, and most not actually mentioning him – a bit of inbuilt deniability there, wot with you being so clever an’ all. And quite a few since he got ban-hammered. I’d find them if I could be arsed but you know they’re there – often finished with a winky flourish. It’s time to leave them now isn’t it?

Mark has made his wishes for the future of STW very clear. IMO, E_L’s comments over-stepped the mark and I took (mild) offence to them.

Eh ? Overstepped what mark ? 😕

Yes I can see that you might have been offended by the fact that I have exposed your contradictions and inconsistencies with regards to party politics, but don’t come out with nonsense about overstepping the mark.

Ernie felt it appropriate to continue but I do not.

Again…….Eh ???

I made my point and was happy to leave it at that …….. but you keep returning to it making absurd claims that I have made a “personal attack” against you. It’s called “not agreeing with you”, I’m sorry if you feel offended by it – perhaps keep off threads where people might disagree with you, such as political ones ? 💡

… can direct their venom

“Venom” ??? Seriously mate, get a grip, ffs 😐