Clear the bar!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=mckI8SFKqpY

Economics explained.

How has it gone quiet?
Frank Field is a Labour MP.

www.theguardian.com/money/2015/oct/29/frank-field-backed-by-tory-mps-as-he-attacks-terrifying-tax-credit-plans

Did you not watch the debate?

What are Labour's proposed policies? What's Jeremy Corbyn and his cohorts' plan to save the country? It seems to have gone strangely quiet on that front...

"Field told the chancellor, George Osborne, he could change his image and show he was a serious tax and benefit reformer.

He said the government had to recognise there was no cost-free way to make such changes, and the government might have to accept that the budget surplus would be achieved more slowly than planned."

Do you think Osborne will take any notice of Frank Field?
Do you think he wants to change his image?

rosequartz I was responding to points that various people had made
Eloethan
I'm playing devil's advocate

oops, apparently not allowed to use that word according to another thread, so I will delete it!

I listened to Radio Newcastle this morning where there was a discussion on foodbanks because of what IDS said yesterday.
The last time there was a discussion on foodbanks, the response from the listeners was roughly equal. This morning there were only about three people who said about people using them because they are there. Everybody else was angry at the idea that we had them in our country.

West Newcastle has the largest one in the country. They provide for 400 families/ individuals a week.
They actually do have a benefit adviser, but not someone from the jobcentre, because they know that people who use them are desperate, and have an immediate problem, often caused by the jobcentre.
Many of the people who use food banks are in work, so having someone from the jobcentre is not worth it for them.

rosequartz I was responding to points that various people had made.

I just like to balance an argument.

(and never mentioned food banks)

I think it has already been established that several people on Gransnet - and possibly the so-called "silent majority"- agree with the Conservative narrative that Labour is and always has been a total disaster for the country and an absolute liability so far as the country's economy is concerned.

The Conservative Party has portrayed itself as the only party that has in the past, is now and will in the future be capable of putting the country on the right track. Even if one accepts the Conservative analysis that Labour has made virtually no positive contribution to this country in either the near or distant past, the figures demonstrate that exports and investment are falling whereas imports and private debt are rising. The very small increases in GDP have been mainly put down to rising house prices and increased consumer spending (which Carney said is "unsustainable"), and any reduction in the deficit has been at the expense of the selling off of national assets such as the Royal Mail and Eurostar, and cuts in health, education, welfare, etc., etc. There are apparently plenty more sell-offs in the pipeline: Channel 4, The Met Office, The Land Registry, etc. etc. All these sell-offs and cuts are short term measures to massage the figures that will have long term economic implications for the country.

Last night on a programme called "Can't Pay, We'll take it away" it was stated that the average debt for sole traders/the self-employed is £16,000. The 2015 Drewberry Survey of employed and self-employed workers found that the self-employed were at "significant financial risk".

You misunderstand me if you think I'm saying only jobs in teaching or other professions are worthy jobs. Up until the age of 58 I had spent a working lifetime as a secretary - a non-professional job which is often characterised as requiring little brain power - so I'm certainly not "sneering" at anybody. In my view, any jobs that really need to be done - such as cleaners, carers, nurses, builders, painters and decorators, teachers, bus/train/van drivers, shop assistants, etc, etc, etc are more likely to have a natural level of demand. Jobs such as "nail technician", "personal trainer", etc., etc. have a limited and unpredictable market, and irregular demand means that people who have been advised to become self-employed are left not knowing from one week to the next how many hours' work they will get. Jobs like these are often unregulated and therefore anybody can describe themselves as such without having the necessary training or skills to do them, which is not, in the long run, in anybody's interests. It does, however, remove those doing them from the unemployment statistics.

On The Wright Stuff this morning a volunteer at a food bank in Southampton called in to say that most of the people it helped were single homeless men, families who were struggling to manage on very low pay, and people who had been made redundant and were awaiting their benefits (it apparently takes on average 5 weeks from application for benefits to be received), etc. etc. There was no suggestion from him that illegal/legal immigrants, drug addicts or people with mental health problems were disproportionately represented. And if immigrants are "legal" why should they be specifically mentioned anyway? My husband is a legal immigrant who has has lived and worked in this country for 46 years - why should it be a particular issue if he went to a food bank?

In The I yesterday there was an article which reported that NHS statistics show cases of malnutrition and other Victorian diseases are "soaring" in Britain - up from 4,883 in 2010-2011 to 7,366 from August 2014 to July 2015. This suggests to me that the creation of more and more food banks does not arise because they exist but that they exist because there is a growing need for them.

Far more people in work now

Yes roses, but you must realise that some of them are:
"self-employed" by doing jobs like "nail technician", "personal trainer", "slimming consultant"

Why those jobs are in inverted commas as if they are something to be sneered at I do not know.

Perhaps they are not 'worthy jobs' like teaching.

What is needed, is a survey of who actually uses them, are they people on benefits, people with low paid jobs, immigrants, both legal and ilegal, drug users, people with mental health problems etc.Only then, will we get a true picture if what's happening.But the more of them there are, the more they will be used.

We had a thread about food banks a while ago.The more of them pop up the more people will use them, and there are many, many reasons why people use them.

Doing better than under Brown in the last Labour government.Far more people in work now.

Roses, your post is meaningless. Doing better? Than what? When?
To improve? From what? When? How has it improved?

Have you heard about IDS idea to put jobcentre advisers in food banks?
He has accepted the idea that food banks are here to stay, wehich I find appalling, but does not realise what they are about.
People use them not because they do not have a job, but because they do not have any food in the short term. They are sent to food banks by job centre advisers, among other people, in the first place.
Should he not instead be busy sorting out the benefits system so people do not have to go to food banks?

www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2015/10/29/a-basic-income-for-everyone-would-solve-osbornes-tax-credit-problem/

What about this for an idea?

Ana Well, presumably you agreed with it or why quote it?

Good post RoseQuartz you beat me to it!All those things were happening under a Labour administration.
So Britain is not the Garden Of Eden, but it's doing better than it was.It was always going to take a long time to improve.

One other of Osborne's mantras

"I am going to strive ( how he loves that word) to produce a balanced economy. Britain is too reliant on the service sector"

Of course we all know it was Thatcher who adored the City and allowed our industrial/manufacturing base to contract to a dangerous degree.

How is Osborne doing? Well in his first 5 years our manufacturing/industrial base has got even smaller - we have just seen the latest with the steel works. Germany has mothballed and supported their steel works. Osborne is content to let it go to the wall.
FAILED

'While growth in the latest quarter is driven almost entirely by the service sector (and a bounce from energy extraction like last quarter ), over the year the services are still weaker than last (0.9% v. 0.6%).

In the meantime manufacturing is still (‘officially’) in recession, having fallen for three consecutive quarters, by -0.3% in Q3, -0.5% in Q2 and -0.1% in Q1. Construction has also come off headier growth rates in 2014, and was down -2.2% in the latest quarter.'

Another thing to consider is who owns our manufacturing base. Much of it is owned by foreign companies.

We don't make anything any more:
In 1948 industrial production accounted for 41.7% of our national income. Today it is 14.2%.
Services (such as banks, hairdressing, advertising agencies, dog walking services, etc.) have risen from 45.8% of GDP in 1948 to 79.1% now.

But, as is evident from those statements, that has not just happened in the last few years since the Tories were in power, it has been gradual.
Does anyone else remember the news at 10 (may have been ITV) had a map of Britain, I think every week, showing how industrial production was going down and service industries were rising? I can't remember exactly when it was but it was decades ago.

Household debt has risen to a record £1.4 trillion.
I remember being astonished by younger people flashing their credit cards to buy exactly whatever they wanted from clothes to new kitchens to conservatories for their highly mortgaged house when GB was Chancellor - but heigh ho, 'no more boom and bust' so it was all just fine.

In the late 90s/early 2000s, the share of GDP accounted for by the insurance and finance sector was under 6%. Since then, Britain has become far more reliant on finance - one-third of the UK's service exports are financial services.
So does that mean that when the Tories left power it was a reasonable share of GDP, but after 13 years of Labour we became more reliant on finance?
In the decade before the financial crisis, the UK financial services sector grew more than twice as fast as the UK economy as a whole (B of E bulletin 2011)

This government has created even more over heating in the property sector by introducing the Help to Buy scheme.
I am astonished that no-one has mentioned how house prices went up under the last Labour administration, fuelled in part by the encouragement for people to invest in housing as a pension fund because pensions were becoming less certain. (They also went up under the previous Tory administration, about the same as they did under the last Labour Government).

Why we need hundreds of thousands of people who previously formed part of the unemployment figures to be re-designated as "self-employed" by doing jobs like "nail technician", "personal trainer", "slimming consultant", etc. etc. I don't know
Better to be a nail technician and earning money than claiming benefits surely.

Yes, agreed, Eloethan. I read somewhere today that the average household debt is expected to be £10,000, excluding housing debt, at the end of the financial year.
Another thing I was wondering about is, if people have tax credits stopped, will they not just be able to claim another benefit? How many people claiming tax credits have had housing benefit capped because of the overall benefit cap?
I have seen that when the universal benefit is rolled out, it is likely to cost £24 billion more, because they will have to pay all the benefits to people who do not claim some now, because they are not aware they can claim some of them.
So when IDS has his DWP people in food banks, the cost of benefits will be more than at the moment. Good. By the way, someone has just said on the news programme that 25% of those going to food banks are in work. Just not well-paid work.

I didn't 'speak', *Eloethan.

What I posted was a quote from an unnamed article, as was durhamjen's.

Ana You speak as if the policies that are being pursued are leading to a successful, sustainable economy that will lead to a higher standard of living for everyone.

An article in The Real Economy in April 2014 analysed 3 critical statements that are often made about the UK economy, using statistics and charts produced by the Office for National Statistics, the OECD and other reputable bodies:

We don't make anything any more:
In 1948 industrial production accounted for 41.7% of our national income. Today it is 14.2%.

Services (such as banks, hairdressing, advertising agencies, dog walking services, etc.) have risen from 45.8% of GDP in 1948 to 79.1% now.

We are overly reliant on consumer spending:
The UK's reliance on private consumption (e.g. household spending) is higher than most other developed countries but lower than the US. However, in the UK only 15% of spending is on investment, compared to 19% in the US, 24% in Canada and 49% in China.

We are much too reliant on the City and financial services:
In the late 90s/early 2000s, the share of GDP accounted for by the insurance and finance sector was under 6%. Since then, Britain has become far more reliant on finance - one-third of the UK's service exports are financial services.

In 2014 Mark Carney said "The rise in UK growth is based on unsustainable family spending".

Household debt has risen to a record £1.4 trillion. Booming property prices are forcing buyers to take on bigger loans or to pay sky high rents.

In 2013 The Independent headlined a report "We are too dependent on London"

This year The Economist warned "Too much finance is bad for the economy".

The Financial Times recently reported:

GDP growth slows to 0.5%.

Manufacturing output fell 0.3%. Construction down by 2.2%

Mining, quarrying rose by 0.3%

Services sector, which constitutes the bulk of the economy (and a third of which is represented by the financial services sector - banking, insurance, etc.) expanded by 0.7%.

So we are in the crazy situation where we are dependent on British people buying goods and services from each other, often with money they have had to borrow, thus adding to the huge amount of private debt in this country.

This government has created even more over heating in the property sector by introducing the Help to Buy scheme. The initial increase in activity in the construction sector has now slowed down.

We need investment in research and development and in infrastructure. Why we need hundreds of thousands of people who previously formed part of the unemployment figures to be re-designated as "self-employed" by doing jobs like "nail technician", "personal trainer", "slimming consultant", etc. etc. I don't know. And why these non-essential jobs should be considered preferable to jobs caring for sick, disabled and elderly people, working in schools, etc. etc., I really don't understand.

I think you will find a lot of socialists use and have used their privileged backgrounds and superior education to further their careers and line their pockets, even sending their own children to privileged schools, which let's face it is barefaced hypocrisy, especially for those on the far left! Don't do as I do comes to mind!!! So don't give me this disapproving attitude about Tories, if we're honest, they're all at it, one way or another!!

Not by any apparent desire on his part though, he was only nominated to counter the other candidates who were considered by some to be too close to the centre of politics to be true 'lefties'.