Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[viper37]

As mentioned being white isn't an issue for the majority of people in the country. Its not something most white people think about at all.

As it should be. And it should be the same for other racial group. Just because you are Pakistani or Black or Hispanic does not mean you form a single group of a single mind all across the world, or even across a country.

However all else being equal the odds are higher the Pakistani outsider can relate better than a white outsider. 

Not really, no.  It's what many politiicans will try to convince you off, but it's garbage.

[Josquius]

As mentioned being white isn't an issue for the majority of people in the country. Its not something most white people think about at all.

As it should be. And it should be the same for other racial group. Just because you are Pakistani or Black or Hispanic does not mean you form a single group of a single mind all across the world, or even across a country.

And there shouldn't be rape or murder or geordie shore either.
The world is an imperfect place. Racism does exist.

Even away from the negatives, different communities do have different group values and shared experiences. Growing up in London you'll have a very different experience to growing up in the Highlands, even if all else is as equal as can be

However all else being equal the odds are higher the Pakistani outsider can relate better than a white outsider.

Not really, no.  It's what many politiicans will try to convince you off, but it's garbage.
[/quote]
Yes really, yes.
I've never heard a politician say this at all: no doubt they've people on their teams doing this work, but it's not the kind of thing they actively put forward at all, even when they are obviously targeting particular demographics they tend to play ignorant on it.

[garbon]

Alright, should we move on from this?

[Sheilbh]

This is the way I see it: there are 7.5 weeks before the end of August. If you have 6 weeks for the postal ballot, that just leaves 1.5 weeks for narrowing the competitors to two, getting ballots ready, counting votes, resigning, etc.

More to the point: if they are rational, there is no need to rush this. Boris may take a lot of flack but that will associate with him. You don't want the new prime minister to be saddled with "chosen in a rushed leadership contest" for the next few years.

If I was a Tory I'd absolutely agree - I think a longer competition is the better option. But there are still stories dropping about Johnson and a growing awareness that his resignation honours list is going to be an absolute shitshow of nepotism on a scale that would make Lloyd-George and Wilson blush. I think they may push to cauterise as soon as they can.

Edit: Also to correct my answer to Larch - he's resigned as Tory party leader but not as PM until the Tory party have a new leader.

I have to say I like that all the Tory leadership candidates have told Sturgeon she can pound sand on wanting a new referendum--as has even Keir Starmer. It's interesting that it wasn't long ago what I call the "Sheilbh" style of British spinelessness about secession was at the helm of both major parties, and is now out in both of them. It could do Britain some good in the long term to have politicians willing to stand up to Scottish truculence.

I agree with the government's line that there's no basis for a new independence referendum and with their criteria that I tink you need a sign in the polls that there's majority desire for independence. That hasn't been the case since 2014. In my view there's no justification for a referendum at this point or for the foreseeable (and in my view if the union survives Boris it'sll be fine).

On the candidates there's a lot - I think we're now up to 11. I think the three interesting candidates are Sunak, Tugendhat and Badenoch. Suank's clearly emerging as the "establishment" candidate. He's done a lot of work and has a very solid base of endorsements. He's also clearly positioned his candidacy as being realist and not for "comforting fairy tales" - by which he's defending the current tax policy (which he designed) against calls to cut taxes now. I think he needs something else and something a little bit bolder because at the minute he's basically what I think he is as a politician: Osborne with a bit of charm and I'm not sure that'll be enough. See Kwasi Kwarteng's endorsement of Truss with a dig at Suank: "we can't simply be accountants trying to balance the books the whole time. We have got to look to growth as well." Plus the Telegraph have already published a 400 word memo of attack lines on Sunak that's circulating in the party - and he's the one Johnson allies are desperate to stop.

Tom Tugendhat on the other hand has, I think emerged, as the interesting challenge from the left of the party. I have no ideas what his view are on domestic policy because he's never been a minister and is chair of the foreign affairs committee. But he's had some really striking endorsements including Anne-Marie Trevelyan who was a Boris dead-ender in the cabinet and a fairly long-standing member of the ERG and was a director of Vote Leave. He's also the only leadership contender who went to the Northern Research Group's conference in Doncaster and has been endorsed by their chair. He's attracted support that is wider than expected and seems like the "change" candidate from the left of the party.

Then there's Kemi Badenoch who again has no cabinet experience and has only been a junior minister. I mainly know her as a bit of a culture warrior. But she's, I think, the most interesting candidate on the right of the party and also (despite being the same age as Sunak, because she's not been in the cabinet) the "skip a generation" candidate. She's had big endorsements from Michael Gove (who, for all his faults, I think is the most effective cabinet minister of the last decade) and Neil O'Brien. O'Brien is probably the MP who's actually done most thinking about "levelling up" as an actual agenda - he's written loads of policy papers and founded a think tank dedicated to "levelling up" that was launched with support from Ruth Davidson and Michael Gove. They're two really strong and striking endorsements for an underdog campaign and both talk about her caring about growth, state capacity, getting things done and not just tax cuts - which is striking (and helpful) for a candidate I was mainly aware of for culture war reasons.

Tempted to put a bet on Badenoch. She's an underdog and unlikely to win but I feel like she might actually end up being the candidate of the right and is more interesting than Sunak

Edit: Also I just find it really interesting that while everyone else is just racing to announce how much they'll cut taxes or why they won't cut taxes - she's basically been endorsed by the entire Department for Levelling Up and seems to be the only one talking about that bit of their agenda. It's really striking.

Edit: She also resigned in the group letter with four other junior ministers who are talked about as ones to watch for the future - I think she's received endorsements from them all now. And if you want to escape the shadow of Johnson the Tories could do a lot worse - a bit like Cameron in 2005.

[Sheilbh]

Separately really good article by Torsten Bell. I've moaned about this for ages but we need to get over the distaste about the economy we have and lean into our strengths in services - professional services, finance, culture, universities, research. The constant desire to simply be Germany is not an option and neither is some romanticised re-industrialisation and the love of politicians to pose in a high-vis jacket:

Why be a poor version of Germany instead of doing what we do best?
Torsten Bell
Manufacturing is not our forte. But we are world beaters in services. Success will prove elusive until we recognise that
Sun 10 Jul 2022 09.00 BST

It's time to get serious about the British economy. Yes, we are a member of the family of high-income nations, but we are a long way from the top of this group and the gap has been widening. Growth ground to a halt in March and the OECD forecasts the UK economy will not grow at all in 2023, a worse performance than any G20 country bar Russia.

Such predictions of future underperformance should be treated as highly uncertain, but our recent experiences of it are painfully concrete. We caught up with more productive countries such as France, Germany and the US during the 1990s and early 2000s. But that came to an end in the mid-2000s and our relative performance has been declining ever since. While we are not yet in danger of relegation from the top division, we are increasingly a long way from qualifying for the Champions League.

Our productivity growth in the 12 years since the financial crisis has been half the average across the 25 richest OECD countries. This slow growth combines with high inequality to mean our poorer households are very significantly poorer than their equivalents in France. We cannot go on like this. Both main political parties recognise the need for change. The former chancellor Rishi Sunak rightly noted that consistently weak investment by British firms was holding back growth, while Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, points to weak growth as a key reason the tax burden is rising. But a growing consensus about the problem is very different to being serious about the solution.

We are not, for example, even serious about the fundamental building block of any renewed economic strategy: what kind of economy the UK is. Commentators often talk of the British economy as being narrowly built on banking, which is as misplaced as the claim that there is an easy route to turning ourselves into a German-style manufacturing superpower – remember George Osborne's promised "march of the makers"? These pop narratives obscure the reality that Britain is a broad-based services economy. We're talking musicians and architects, as well as bankers. Information and communications technology, culture and marketing, as well as finance (whose fraction of total exports fell from 12% to 9% in the pre-pandemic decade). No one celebrates it, but the UK is the second largest exporter of services in the world. And our service specialism does not lie behind our recent underperformance: on average, services-led economies are richer than manufacturing ones.

We have manufacturing strengths too: pharma, aerospace and beverages stand out – yes, scotch is big business for us. But the service-led nature of our economy is not going away. The things countries are good at are highly persistent: of the top 10 products the UK specialised in back in 1989, seven were in our top 10 in 2019. Germany won't leapfrog France in the quality of its wine, nor will Brexit, despite claims, shift us towards producing goods rather than services (some manufacturing sectors will grow (food) but others shrink (electronics). The route to future prosperity lies in being a better version of Britain, not a British version of Germany.

Recognising the nature of our economy is not the same thing as welcoming all aspects of it, but an economic strategy that fails to understand it is no strategy at all. It will leave us without a clear view of how growth is achieved and exposed to policy mistakes.

Within the recent past, we have signed a trade deal with our largest market, giving the EU the goods access it wanted, with little service access in exchange. The Treasury's big tax cut for firms that boost investment – the "super deduction" – applied for firms investing in plant and machinery, but not the intangible investments that service-led economies thrive on. And we seem to spend a lot of time worrying that young people in Britain are receiving too much education, despite the central role for human capital in driving on economies such as ours.

We need to understand the nature of our economy, not only to make a success of it, but to address the downsides it brings, in particular, upward pressure on inequality between people and places that comes because globally successful service firms employ high earners who are based in too few places. Addressing this is essential and possible. France is service-focused like us but has much lower inequality, while our advantages in services could support a strategy that combines a drive for stronger growth with a meaningful levelling up agenda.

High-value service industries thrive when similar firms co-locate in large places with highly educated populations: cities. And it is a huge public policy failure that far too few of our cities outside London capitalise on that. But the scale of investment required means that won't happen without national politicians seeing it as central to our national growth strategy or local politicians feeling able to embrace the disruption because they have the powers to shape it. Success does not look like every major city becoming like London, given very different specialisms, cultures and sizes. And nor is this a strategy for the few: 69% of the UK population live in cities or their hinterlands, compared with 56% in France and just 40% in Italy.

Britain has huge strengths, but we all know we must do better. And the most important first step to improving our country's economy? Understanding our country's economy.

Torsten Bell is chief executive of the Resolution Foundation. Read more at resolutionfoundation.org

On a slightly similar vein a thread by Jeremy Cliffe which I basically agree with:
https://twitter.com/JeremyCliffe/status/1546112779165253632?s=20&t=BaXupYR6Ca_S3qzq_AF6kg

[Valmy]

I thought the English thought manufacturing was evil, what with all those satanic mills. What? Are we going to have romanticizing over enclosure next?

Oh if only we could replace people with sheep! Ok maybe that is a romantic dream of some British people.

[Admiral Yi]

Focusing on services would mean pushing the London slider even further up.  Squeeze is sure to throw a tantrum.

@Valmy: they hated their industrial jobs and they went on strike every week but now they want them back.  So they can go on strike every week.

[Sheilbh]

I thought the English thought manufacturing was evil, what with all those satanic mills. What? Are we going to have romanticizing over enclosure next?

No. The idea of manufacturing, "workshop of the world" etc is really ingrained in Britain I think (which is mad because we've not been that competitive at it for about 150 years). People talk about imperial nostalgia and I don't actually think that's a thing/is vastly overrated. Empire and industry are importantly linked economically but I think the real nostalgia is for an economy that "makes" things and a real sense in which a material economy is better almost on a moral level - compared with the "empty" value of the knowledge economy which is "just moving numbers on a spreadsheet" etc. And I buy the David Edgerton argument that the nostalgia of boomers who voted for Brexit isn't for an imperial past they never experienced, but for the planned, state led "national" industry of the 60s and 70s when Britain, briefly, looked like a normal European country.

There's no nostalgia or attachment to agriculture - but there is to the rural as a space and landscape. But the UK has been disconnected from agriculture for a very long time - in part because of innovations that extracted a lot out of a little, but also because of empire and the huge amount of food the UK historically imported (which was cheap for industrial workers). So even in 1900 only about 15% of the UK workforce was in agriculture while the US and Germany were both double that and other countries even more. It's one of the counter-intuitive effects of being in the EU for the UK is it actually reduced our share of agricultural imports and increased our self-sufficiency - we imported far more food in the 50s or 60s.

I also unironically think enclosure and early agricultural capitalism explains English cuisine - and maybe the industrial revolution and lack of political revolution

Edit: With both rural and manufacturing/industry I think it's almost an aesthetic value and assigning moral value too, rather than desiring a society that actually produces that outcome or the economics behind it. I think that disconnect is a big part of the problem that this government exemplifies - no-one in politics wants to be close to financial/professional services, this government hates the culture industry and loves science and research in theory but is unwilling/unable to put policies in places to support (because that would require a vision, detail, delivering etc).

Focusing on services would mean pushing the London slider even further up.  Squeeze is sure to throw a tantrum.

Not really - as he says we are are fairly urbanised country. There are many cities and the issues with productivity in cities other than London is a huge issue. Focusing on services means unleashing the cities - and, I'd argue, spending on infrastructure (connections between them but also public transport within them), spending on inner cities rather than jam spreading and doing it in a more strategic way than the half-successful New Labour model of building a new museum/arts centre with a plaza and regenerating that area.

[OttoVonBismarck]

Separately really good article by Torsten Bell. I've moaned about this for ages but we need to get over the distaste about the economy we have and lean into our strengths in services - professional services, finance, culture, universities, research. The constant desire to simply be Germany is not an option and neither is some romanticised re-industrialisation and the love of politicians to pose in a high-vis jacket:

I agree with this 100% and to a degree it applies to the U.S. too (although we still have a robust manufacturing sector, it just doesn't employ many people), but the political question comes to what do you do with the disaffected workers that can't transition into services.

[Admiral Yi]

Not really - as he says we are are fairly urbanised country. There are many cities and the issues with productivity in cities other than London is a huge issue. Focusing on services means unleashing the cities - and, I'd argue, spending on infrastructure (connections between them but also public transport within them), spending on inner cities rather than jam spreading and doing it in a more strategic way than the half-successful New Labour model of building a new museum/arts centre with a plaza and regenerating that area.

This is probably a frivolous point (mine, not yours).

One of the advantages the British have in international services is speaking the international language (you're welcome) as a first language.  As such, I think that advantage is stronger for people with plummier, more southern accents.

[Sheilbh]

Maybe - although at some point Hollywood will have an impact on that.

[Valmy]

Maybe - although at some point Hollywood will have an impact on that.

Hollywood loves southern English accents.

[Zanza]

Emulating the German economic model is neither sensible as that model has lots of own issues with the relative decline of globalization, less open markets and Chinese competition,nor feasible as it is based on long grown economic structures.

What might be more interesting if any candidate actually is interested in leveling up is looking at how Germany deliberately spreads some of its federal institutions beyond Berlin and how there is a well-established fiscal mechanism to transfer money from the richer parts to the poorer parts of Germany to achieve a common standard in public services and investments. Local government also seems freer and more powerful in Germany, bit that might just be my impression as I have little real understanding of it in Britain.

[Zanza]

but the political question comes to what do you do with the disaffected workers that can't transition into services.

They are transitioning into services. It's just that say logistics at Amazon or retail at Walmart are sweatshops with very little worker rights (due to lack of unionization?). The policy goal should be to  shift the income distribution so that it is not just the Walton family and Jeff Bezos profiting, but the masses of workers in their companies as well. It cannot be in the interest of society at large to concentrate all income in the hands of a few and have a destitute underclass of service workers.

[Syt]

The gap between productivity increases and worker compensation may have some to do with it.