This is what failure looks like

Whitewavemark2

Plumbers apprenticeships are not going to tackle the decline in the UKs fortunes

Perhaps not, but who would you like to have available when your sink springs a leak? Apart from being useful - to the point of essential - a good trades work force brings money into the economy and provides peace of mind for those who need to have work done.

One problem (I'm being serious) is the lack of Saturday jobs or paper rounds to get young people used to work.

Both I and my DH had Saturday or weekend jobs when we were young - early 60s. I worked in Woolies and was lucky enough to also do holiday cover during the school holidays and help with the stock take at weekends (double time). This gave me a very good idea of what money could buy and how long I needed to work in order to get that money. When I started a single record cost 6/8d and my day's pay was less than twice that amount. If I wanted to buy an LP (cost 29/11d) it took 3 days wages.

I stayed at Woolies until just before leaving school and then went to work at Ilfords film processing whilst waiting until the autumn for a Civil Service interview. That was incredibly boring apart from when I was in the department that checked the prints for quality. I saw many interesting sights.
Unfortunately they had musak which came on for 15 minute intervals.Once one had got used to that the time went by very slowly.

Wheniwasyourage

Whitewavemark2

Plumbers apprenticeships are not going to tackle the decline in the UKs fortunes

Perhaps not, but who would you like to have available when your sink springs a leak? Apart from being useful - to the point of essential - a good trades work force brings money into the economy and provides peace of mind for those who need to have work done.

Yes of course, but this thread is about the macroeconomy.

Well, I mean I guess it doesn’t matter if it strays though

Katie59

Dinahmo

"The average person is £11000 worse off than they would have been if the rise in salaries had continued to do so under Labour."

I don't quite follow the above statement as it implies that Labour is at fault.

Blair was certainly on the right track during his first term, but deregulation went too far, credit was too easy and the banks got greedy. Lack of caution has caused the current banking crisis, nobody took account of what might happen if interest rates rose, or maybe they just thought they were too big to fail.

Maybe Labour will get elected and make the changes needed but don’t expect it to be easy

My comment was because the OP implies that Labour is at fault.

I think that the current banking crisis was triggered by the spending plans and tax cuts of Truss and Kwarteng. These two have rarely, if ever, been seen in the HOC since their resignations.

Dinahmo

One reason why people want to increase their incomes is the ever increasing price of houses and the lack of affordable houses for rent (not private landlords). For the majority it is their major investment and they want the value to increase.

I would put the beginning of many of our problems at the sell off of public housing and the associated ban on using the proceeds to build more and the privatisation of utilities. All of which began under Thatcher.

I so agree with this post. It is ludicrous that modest houses in my London suburb are now selling for over £800.00. All council properties have been sold off long ago and nothing affordable being built. No hope for young folks.

I doubt a Labour government will be any better than a Conservative government. They will just mess it up in different ways.

The situation of the UK has deteriorated so much in recent years that any government will take years and years to remedy it. The list of problems to be tackled is enormous. And there is little public recognition or acceptance of long term change, for example the reduction in the numbers of younger people in work compared with the pensioners their taxes support, the aspiration for the job that follows university rather than vocational training, the decline of British manufacturing competitiveness compared with say China, the self-inflicted injury of Brexit to trade and labour mobility and the lack of large scale tax income to apply to important services such as social care and the military to mention only two. My only conclusion at present is we are suffering from the lack of an adequate political class across the board.

M0nica

I doubt a Labour government will be any better than a Conservative government. They will just mess it up in different ways.

Is it really likely that any electable Labour government could possibly do more damage than the last 8 yrs of Tory rule.

Give them a chance, I am sure they could.

M0nica

Give them a chance, I am sure they could.

Looking at Labours history during the Blair years, I a quite interested in being pointed to how much more damage they did to the economy than the Tories have done.

Dinahmo

One reason why people want to increase their incomes is the ever increasing price of houses and the lack of affordable houses for rent (not private landlords). For the majority it is their major investment and they want the value to increase.

I would put the beginning of many of our problems at the sell off of public housing and the associated ban on using the proceeds to build more and the privatisation of utilities. All of which began under Thatcher.

That has been obvious to many of us for a long time. How Thatcher thought a country could survive and thrive merely because of her blue eyed boys in the city, is something mere mortals can not understand. Many years ago an American told me he thought "your Margaret Thatcher is wonderful" He was taken aback when I told him no one I knew thought the same.

To be honest, I feel sorry for anyone (hopefully Labour) forming the next government for they have years of damage caused by deliberate austerity, cuts to public services to deal with and combine that with the Tory supporting printed press who will jump on everything as an example of Labour policy and we are in for an interesting, probably difficult few years. I am however slightly heartened by the fact that even on the BBC, political commentators and economists are not only talking about Brexit, but acknowledging the damage that it has done to the economy. That, and the number of people openly describing Johnson as a liar, makes me feel a little optimistic that the mass gaslighting of this country may be over.

“makes me feel a little optimistic that the mass gaslighting of this country may be over.”

There has been a lot of gaslighting Sunak has been doing as much as he can to reduce it, that will benefit us all, especially Labour. If the UKs open hostility is replaced with co-operation the economy will recover more quickly.

If the UKs open hostility is replaced with co-operation the economy will recover more quickly.

The UK's open hostility to what, Katie59?

The economy isn't going to recover under the current government. And, unless they break free from the current belief in cutting public spending and raising taxes to 'pay off the deficit' it isn't going to recover under Labour, either.

We need a bit of Keynesian economics and lots of state investment; I'm not sure Labour will do it.

Wyllow3

We do need really attractive apprenticeship schemes, and help for businesses/colleges to run them. I don't believe that they would be unattractive to many youngsters. Some like in hairdressing and beauty run very well atm, not sure about plumbing, electrics, building etc - often well paid jobs..

I used to lecture in an FE college and one of departments there was related to the building trades. Courses there were always oversubscribed and obviously those who completed them were very employable. Then, out of the blue, these courses were all scrapped. None of us knew exactly why, but presumably they were expensive to run and they were not profitable.
All further and higher education now seems to be based on whether or not the institutions can make enough money out of them. Surely this should not be the case, valuable and necessary training should be funded directly.
I actually taught on government Employment Training schemes during which students usually learnt enough IT to enable them to get a work placement and eventually get a job. Unfortunately we lost this contract because another "provider" said they could guarantee work placements and jobs - which is a pretty dubious claim!
I agree with others who suggest that all levels of our education system may need their aims tweaking to make people more employable. In teens and later more technical courses and apprenticeships would be a start, but I understand that the paperwork involved in employing an apprentice is not insignificant.
Too many young people go to university to study for qualifications that are unlikely to lead to future work. In my parent's generation and earlier there were evening classes which went towards a qualification and a better job. Equally, if you wanted to study English literature or Art you could do this in evening classes whilst earning a living during the day.

Dinahmo

One reason why people want to increase their incomes is the ever increasing price of houses and the lack of affordable houses for rent (not private landlords). For the majority it is their major investment and they want the value to increase.

I would put the beginning of many of our problems at the sell off of public housing and the associated ban on using the proceeds to build more and the privatisation of utilities. All of which began under Thatcher.

I agree much of what you say, Thatcher did a lot of damage to the stock of social housing in this country. However I don't think that houses should be seen primarily as a means of making money, the result of this has been rising house prices. They should be seen as homes, not just investments.

As regards the privatisation of utilities, this has has simply meant that there is an increase in expensive management in these companies and another layer of people taking a profit from them (i.e. shareholders).

My husband was a professional hydraulic engineer and the privatisation of the water industry destroyed many of the consulting firms (including his) which had previously brought in a lot of business from abroad and helped the balance of payments. They also provided design and other services which helped individual water companies to run their systems well.

Our water industry is now managed by people who often have little or no technical knowledge - other than accountancy. The water companies are purely profit making machines and have no interest in the maintenance of water infrastructure beyond legal compliance.

I can only assume that the same is true of the other privatised utilities.

Whitewavemark2

M0nica

Give them a chance, I am sure they could.

Looking at Labours history during the Blair years, I a quite interested in being pointed to how much more damage they did to the economy than the Tories have done.

Gordon Brown changed the tax rules for pensions which means that, for example, you are taxed on dividends within your pension fund whilst you are building it up. This has resulted in a real reduction in the value of many private pensions and in institutional pension funds.
However I agree with the idea that there should be a limit to how much the more wealthy sections of society should be able to protect from the tax system in private pension funds.

For my part I think our low standard of living did start with Thatcher. She encouraged financial grabbing so my son's friends on leaving university with good engineering degrees turned to the City for quick money. Council homes were sold off at a subsidised rate so of course tenants bought the good stock and left the country with higher maintenance costs for social housing. Privatisation of our major utilities meant people with money bought shares and the poor lost out. I believe also, though perhaps not under Thatcher, the economic union encouraged Germany with manufacturing, France with agriculture and we got financial services and still suffer from their over presence. Not content with this Thatcher was the milk snatcher - a universal free bonus for children to help with good nutrition went. And as for the Falklands War - the cost of defending that minor asset still weighs us down. (My apologies to the Falklanders.)
11 years of Thatcher! But perhaps the final nail in the coffin in our descent was the change to universities of polytechnics which had produced our 'doers' in society. Why instead couldn't their status have been raised. And how many of our MPs and civil servants studied PPE (politics, philosophy and economy) to set them on their public governing career - far too many I suspect.

The UK's open hostility to what, Katie59?

To the EU

If you had read the previous post you might have gained a clue

Not to mention the £50k that 1950's born women lost out on with a six year increase to wait for state pension (compared to one year for men). Now it's going to start and impact on 1960's born women and men.

....and @gn38, I would make Systems Theory compulsory for all MP's as well so that they are able to take an informed view of the knock on effects/'unintended consequences' of their actions and policies, instead of just taking a very simplistic view.

From the late 1990s concerns were being expressed in the media about the way lending was running out of hand, the lack of controls on personal and mortgage lending. All sorts of institutions were offering investment 'packages' to ordinary people, including pensioners. Try to understand what these packages were and you needed a PhD in finance

The Labour government in power did nothing to stop this credit growth expanding. Irt ended with building societies like Northern Rock offering 125% mortgages. DD moved house in 2006. She worked out in advance what size mortgage she could afford, but had lenders offering her loans up to twice the amount she felt she could safely afford.

While the financial collapse started in the US, better financial management in the UK could have reduced its impact on this country. The reason Mark Carney was offered the job of Governor of the Bank of England is because at the time of the great collapse he had been Governor of the Bank of Canada and Canada had avoided the worst affects of the financial crisis - and so could the UK had it not been for the reckless financial management of this country by Gordon Brown in his last few years in power. To begin with he was 'prudent' and cautious, but towards the end he lost it.

The finance industry, with its quick rewards, has skewed the UK economy.
And there has for decades been a problem with the word engineer in this country. In France and Germany, a person can call themself engineer only after a specific university training, whereas here the person who mends a washing machine would describe themself as an engineer. My late DH (Cambridge mechanical sciences tripos) did feel that his profession lacks the status of, say architecture, because the word engineer covers a wide range of expertise.
Has this meant that many of our brightest and best engineering graduates (not DH who led his own manufacturing company) have gone into the finance industry?

DH is a Chartered Engineer. Many years ago I went into an insurance brokers to insure our car, the clerk, looked up at me when I gave his profession, and said 'Does that mean he works in a garage?' I mean no disrespect to car mechanics, but it was the automatic assumption that that is what 'engineers' did.

M0nica

DH is a Chartered Engineer. Many years ago I went into an insurance brokers to insure our car, the clerk, looked up at me when I gave his profession, and said 'Does that mean he works in a garage?' I mean no disrespect to car mechanics, but it was the automatic assumption that that is what 'engineers' did.

Same with my DH who was a prof of engineering at the local university. He wouldn’t be able to work as a car mechanic if he tried, either. The UK is a very rich country, though, even when you look at the current situation. Like many countries the wealth is unbalanced and in the hands of a few which is always an issue.