Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Syt]

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2022/oct/01/kwasi-kwarteng-liz-truss-uk-economy-politics-latest-news

Britain should prepare for new age of austerity, warns Simon Clarke

Simon Clarke, the levelling up minister and a key Liz Truss ally, has told the Times that the market chaos that followed the government's tax cutting mini-budget would pass and warned that Britain should prepare for a new age of austerity.

He also said the prime minister was "enjoying having the chance" to enact policies that "she believes is right".

Despite the turmoil in financial markets, Clarke said that Truss was "astonishingly resilient" and urged the government to channel the spirit of Margaret Thatcher to push ahead with their vision.

The 38-year-old said:

If I was to describe one word for Liz at the moment, it is purposeful. She knew – and this was certainly something we discussed during the summer – that this would not be a comfortable process.

Clarke added that for too long western countries have lived in a "fool's paradise" and there would be cuts to government spending to ensure "full alignment with a lower-tax economy".

Clarke said:

My big concern in politics is that western Europe is just living in a fool's paradise whereby we can be ever less productive relative to our peers, and yet still enjoy a very large welfare state and persist in thinking that the two are somehow compatible over the medium to long term.

They're not. We need to address that precisely because in the end, if we want those strong public services then we are going to have to pay for them. I think it is important that we look at a state which is extremely large, and look at how we can make sure that it is in full alignment with a lower tax economy.

[Josquius]

More seriously, it seems nurses are underpaid by NHS, so they quit their job for... pubs.

[

If there's a more underpaid job than nurses I challenge anyone to find it.

Look at nursing as it was 80 years ago and it makes sense. It was just a untrained job to assist doctors with the unimportant minor tasks and caring for patients outside of their treatment.

But nursing isn't like that anymore. It's a super skilled job, not far below being a doctor at all in terms of complex tasks. Then with the way things are shifting in the modern world and the easy availability of knowledge, the patient care aspects of the job are far more relatively important than they once were.

Being a nurse these days should be a very financially comfortable job.

Instead it's just as life destroying as being a doctor but for a fraction of the pay.

I have two trained nurses in my family...one just stopped working altogether and the other got a job as a on site nurse for a building company. Staying with the nhs was just a crap option. The only reason it has any nurses is foreigners who have yet to be here long enough to be able to take other opportunities and people who care far more about doing good than they do having a decent wage

[Richard Hakluyt]

Let me explain the government's position. Nurses need to be paid badly to encourage them to get a proper job in finance or set up a business as an entrepreneur. Only then can the UK become richer 

[mongers]

Let me explain the government's position. Nurses need to be paid badly to encourage them to get a proper job in finance or set up a business as an entrepreneur. Only then can the UK become richer 

Indeed, that's the spirit.

[viper37]

More seriously, it seems nurses are underpaid by NHS, so they quit their job for... pubs.

[

If there's a more underpaid job than nurses I challenge anyone to find it.

Look at nursing as it was 80 years ago and it makes sense. It was just a untrained job to assist doctors with the unimportant minor tasks and caring for patients outside of their treatment.

But nursing isn't like that anymore. It's a super skilled job, not far below being a doctor at all in terms of complex tasks. Then with the way things are shifting in the modern world and the easy availability of knowledge, the patient care aspects of the job are far more relatively important than they once were.

Being a nurse these days should be a very financially comfortable job.

Instead it's just as life destroying as being a doctor but for a fraction of the pay.

I have two trained nurses in my family...one just stopped working altogether and the other got a job as a on site nurse for a building company. Staying with the nhs was just a crap option. The only reason it has any nurses is foreigners who have yet to be here long enough to be able to take other opportunities and people who care far more about doing good than they do having a decent wage

looking at wages here, that 25-45h$/hr for nurses.  They have a good social care package, decent vacation time, very good insurances.  It's a dream job... Except... There's shitty work conditions becase there's mandatory overtime, and by overtime, I don't mean "can you please stay 30 minutes later", it's double shift all the time, sometimes triple because there's no one to relieve them.

[Zanza]

Liz Truss: the normie playing the rebel

Liz Truss began her career at that plucky start-up, Shell. She moved on to Cable & Wireless, which was founded in a tempest of risk-taking and rule-breaking. In 1869. Her wild card of a chancellor never got around to being an entrepreneur or (unless we count a hedge fund boss) working for one. Truss is a scion of the public sector middle class. Kwasi Kwarteng could not have passed through a stabler set of institutions — Eton, Harvard, JPMorgan — had he interned at the Vatican.

None of the credentials of mavericks but all of the pose: whatever else is said about these two, they are of their time. A co-authored treatise, were it honest, would be called something like Move Slow and Say Things.

When did normies start doing this? When did status and lustre come to reside in cheeking the establishment? What happened to joining it? Truss and her backers will believe that financial markets are made of "sheeple" in thrall to "group think" and "orthodoxy". The more the bourses convulse, the surer the government will be that it is on to something. I don't want here to go into the question of whether they are right. The point is rather their relish in dissent. Why do such conventional people so enjoy filing the minority report?

Americans will know the type. The most intriguing Donald Trump voters I met there weren't the most extreme. They were upper-middle people in several senses — age, income, education — who had never been able to play the rebel before. What he conferred on these country club and Chamber of Commerce types was the glamour of transgression: a sort of second youth. Again, I don't say they were misguided. I just report the glee with which they cocked a snook. So much upheaval in the west of late has been caused by the contrarianism of the banal.

No one sweats to join a club to change the carpet and burn the house rule book

How to explain it? Samuel Johnson was wrong that men think less of themselves for never having soldiered. Still, the further a society gets from its last existential test, the more desk-bound and temperature-controlled the texture of life becomes, the more some innate human need for risk goes unmet. And so it finds alternative outlets. The boom in martial sports is one that Chuck Palahniuk saw coming in Fight Club. Another is the proliferation of a kind of sham maverick in public life.

It is reported that Truss's supply-side reforms are known internally as Operation Rolling Thunder. Besides the question of taste — the name comes from a bombing campaign in Vietnam — who speaks like this? This is going to a Rage Against the Machine gig at 50. This is popping a collar and taking a long drag of a cigarette. It is iconoclasm as interpreted by someone who has never put anything on the line. In this, she is less bad than some of the friendly wonks and pundits (note again the low-stakes work) who will her to "smash" Britannia's chains.

This stuff is new. The rebel pose, a generation ago, wasn't de rigueur among the mid-life bourgeoisie. You weren't being faulted for your "received wisdom" over cocktails by men called Hank and Bob. For all their inner zeal, the Thatcherites were stylistically trad. But then memories of war and other dark times weren't quite so remote. There wasn't as much ennui to seek relief from. Or virility to prove. Propping up civilised order was as high-status as "disrupting" it has become.

Normies acting otherwise: if I am vigilant to this fraud, it is because I commit the inverse one. Someone with my tastes and sensibilities should live in Hackney, not Hampstead, but something, some arriviste chippiness, needs the imprimatur of an establishment neighbourhood. My instinctive reaction to being smeared as "elite" is to blush at the compliment. ("Made it, ma.") A psychobabbler would say it goes back to the childhood angst of waiting for the Indefinite Leave to Remain letter from the Home Office, then the naturalisation one, then the passport. No one sweats to join a club to change the carpet and burn the house rule book. "Provocative, throwaway lines," is what a former Truss colleague, Rory Stewart, says she trades in. I can picture the smirk: the sense of safety behind it.

https://www.ft.com/content/bb6cc1ac-e543-4b68-9c60-d8844a90af8c

[Richard Hakluyt]

Maybe they should buy leather jackets to wear on their way to cabinet meetings?

Or smoke the odd joint. These are the tried and traditional ways for normskis to appear less banal, trashing a G7 economy may not end up so well for them.

[Syt]

This article made me curious. Based on Wikipedia (I know ... ) there's only three PMs since WW2 who didn't get an education at Oxford:
- Gordon Brown
- John Major
- James Callaghan (though he got the entrance certificate but couldn't afford attending)

[Admiral Yi]

Major didn't go to uni at all, which is pretty trippy.

[Richard Hakluyt]

...and, notably, as a child he ran away from the circus.

Plus, his brother was a garden gnome manufacturer.

[Syt]

Still, a UK PM who didn't attend Oxford/Cambridge is about as rare as a UK comedian who wasn't part of the Cambridge Footlights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_Footlights_members

[Richard Hakluyt]

The Cambridge comedians are a lot more fun than the Oxford ones running the country though; even if they are still coming from a position of privilege 

[Syt]

That's a fair point.

It does generally raise the question, though, how much future careers are decided based on the education (which I assume is excellent) and how much is based on the connections people form while attending.

[Josquius]

Maybe we could swap?
Stephen Fry for PM, Lizz Truss for panel show hosting?

[Legbiter]

Maybe they should buy leather jackets to wear on their way to cabinet meetings?

Or smoke the odd joint. These are the tried and traditional ways for normskis to appear less banal, trashing a G7 economy may not end up so well for them.

Liz Truss and her cabinet seem pretty DOA.