Labour Conference....total maddness or even possable ?
Discussion
Breadvan72 said:
Keynes was by most accounts a good negotiator and a practical realist, but the US held all the cards and played deliberate hardball in pursuit of wide US policy objectives that were as it turned out very misguided.
I would rate Attlee as the number one PM of the C20 and possibly the number one PM ever. He is up there with Pitt 2, Gladstone, Disraeli, Churchill, and Lloyd George. His cabinet team were mostly fab.
I am sorry for being rude to you about Charles I on another thread, Derek. I was a tad astonished that someone so historically well read as you had been, it seemed to me, blindsided on an important one like that, but (joke!) you get a pass for getting the law of the constitution wrong as you used to be a cozzer (joke!) .
Accepted. It is in the past.I would rate Attlee as the number one PM of the C20 and possibly the number one PM ever. He is up there with Pitt 2, Gladstone, Disraeli, Churchill, and Lloyd George. His cabinet team were mostly fab.
I am sorry for being rude to you about Charles I on another thread, Derek. I was a tad astonished that someone so historically well read as you had been, it seemed to me, blindsided on an important one like that, but (joke!) you get a pass for getting the law of the constitution wrong as you used to be a cozzer (joke!) .
I had a few uncles who were highly politicised. They were fans of Atlee and I took this to mean they were partial. When in my 30s I started to take an interest in modern political history I found that much of what they said was true, particularly the inept management of the economy immediately post WWI. Come the time and all that, but we were lucky that he - and his team - were there.
Churchill was much more profligate and the strong economy, given the state of it in 1945, allowed him to be so. But he wrote the histories, and many academics were reluctant to contradict him.
Rovinghawk said:
mike74 said:
Labour making plans to combat ''capital flight''....
Are they actually admitting that people would choose to flee from their Utopia?????Breadvan72 said:
Back in the mid 1940s, lots of stuff was nationalised, and the sky failed to fall. Indeed, things went quite well for quite a bit. Much of the so called privatisation of the last few decades hasn't been real privatisation - it has been conjuring with balance sheets. Much risk has remained with the public (sometimes with reward going elsewhere). Recent events show that even banks can get nationalised without Communism suddenly happening.
I fail to see quite what benefits you believe nationalisation brings? Your points all seem to be that doing this insanely expensive and complicated thing doesn't then cause much damage (at least for a while).Breadvan72 said:
You may have missed the small matter of the UK leaving the EU (something that the PLP hates, the leadership likes, Momentum hates, and traditional core voters are thought possibly to like) . Whilst there will likely not be a financial meltdown, the notion that things will all just carry on just fine and dandy is, at the least, debatable.
Yes, it was interesting to hear Mr Corbyn talking about in an interview about leaving the EU being a necessary step to effect Labour's nationalisation plans "because of state aid rules and so on". Not sure that Momentum has picked up on that comment yet.Tuna said:
Breadvan72 said:
Back in the mid 1940s, lots of stuff was nationalised, and the sky failed to fall. Indeed, things went quite well for quite a bit. Much of the so called privatisation of the last few decades hasn't been real privatisation - it has been conjuring with balance sheets. Much risk has remained with the public (sometimes with reward going elsewhere). Recent events show that even banks can get nationalised without Communism suddenly happening.
I fail to see quite what benefits you believe nationalisation brings? Your points all seem to be that doing this insanely expensive and complicated thing doesn't then cause much damage (at least for a while).Dominic Sandbrook and Andrew Marr are two good authors on Britain since 1945.
Corbyn is still an idiot, by the way, but that's a different issue.
Breadvan72 said:
All that I can say is read some history - there were many benefits conferred by the policies of the 40s, but public ignorance of the recent past, and a deliberate demonisation of the State by some non standard anarchist forces (anarchists who run hedge funds and fund Brexits instead of anarchists living in squats and piercing their eyebrows) lead to the benefits being obscured, and lead to proposals by Corbyn et al that were moderate centre left proposals back in the day being seen now as crazy-ass Communism.
I don't have to read some history, my father and father in law are old enough to remember it all well and hold some very interesting discussions on it. As my FIL worked for both nationalised and private industries, and started a global business in the 70's he has some great insights into private and public businesses. Without exception, he believes that public ownership was a disaster for industry.Granted there were benefits in the 40's - but those were largely the benefits of collectively rebuilding a country that had just been through two enormously damaging wars. What benefits do you believe we would experience now? (And name dropping hedge funds doesn't actually explain what benefit you think nationalisation would bring).
You need to remember that the economic environment we currently live in is a world away from the 40's-70's where product design, business lifecycles, finance and innovation happened in a radically different manner. Nationalisation is not a way to recapture those simpler times.
Breadvan72 said:
The ignorance of postwar history displayed here and elsewhere in NPE is sad.
BL was nationalised because it had failed as a private sector business. There was no lefty ideology involved. It was a bail out. Remember those? The post war nationalisations concerned assets that it was thought should be under public control - water, rail, coal, and so on. Coal is over, but there remain good arguments for having some things in public hands, on the basis that they are too important to be left to the vagaries of markets. Water, roads, rail and some other things could be included.
Back to BL: it did indeed struggle because of lack of investment (this having been a thing that set in during the private sector days), and it struggled because of bad management and over aggressive unions that filled voids left by bad management. My father was a Production Engineer based at Rover just before the Honda hook-up. Honda engineers came to visit and asked when the factory had last retooled. The answer was 1946. The Honda guys said that they retooled their factories every eight years. Rover had not been in public ownership for all of the period 1946 to 1980, so place blame where blame is due.
BL's products were mixed (and too numerous), but included some that could have been world leaders if properly developed - some of the design and engineering was very fine (some, not all). Nationalised BL invented the SUV (Range Rover). Nationalised BL invented the supermini (Metro). (The other game changers, Land Rover and Mini, were private sector inventions). As it was, BL underwent a turnaround in the late 70s and early 80s, (not helped by attempts to micro manage from Whitehall; and even from Downing Street). Michael Edwardes' book "Back from the Brink" is worth a read.
I honestly don't know why you bother but I admire you for your efforts to set the record straight, there is so much ignorance of political and social history on here that I've given up. BL was nationalised because it had failed as a private sector business. There was no lefty ideology involved. It was a bail out. Remember those? The post war nationalisations concerned assets that it was thought should be under public control - water, rail, coal, and so on. Coal is over, but there remain good arguments for having some things in public hands, on the basis that they are too important to be left to the vagaries of markets. Water, roads, rail and some other things could be included.
Back to BL: it did indeed struggle because of lack of investment (this having been a thing that set in during the private sector days), and it struggled because of bad management and over aggressive unions that filled voids left by bad management. My father was a Production Engineer based at Rover just before the Honda hook-up. Honda engineers came to visit and asked when the factory had last retooled. The answer was 1946. The Honda guys said that they retooled their factories every eight years. Rover had not been in public ownership for all of the period 1946 to 1980, so place blame where blame is due.
BL's products were mixed (and too numerous), but included some that could have been world leaders if properly developed - some of the design and engineering was very fine (some, not all). Nationalised BL invented the SUV (Range Rover). Nationalised BL invented the supermini (Metro). (The other game changers, Land Rover and Mini, were private sector inventions). As it was, BL underwent a turnaround in the late 70s and early 80s, (not helped by attempts to micro manage from Whitehall; and even from Downing Street). Michael Edwardes' book "Back from the Brink" is worth a read.
Tuna, I am not sure that you know what the term name dropping means. I have not name dropped anything or anyone, but that is by the by.
I do not have to rely on my dad, although I learned a lot about stuff from him, as I was alive during the period of post war consensus, but I still recommend a bit of study, as relying on the anecdotes of parents, or on personal anecdotes, is not always a reliable guide to anything. Anyone who says "I do not need to read history" either "because I was there" or (worse) "because I know someone who was there" may sometimes have a problem. I was there, but I do not rely on that. Nationalisation was not just about rebuilding a shattered nation after war. It was also about changing the way in which society was structured, and recognising that there are some things that the market is not always good at. As noted above, some of the so called privatisation has been a bit of a con anyway, with the taxpayer still on the hook for downsides.
I do not have to rely on my dad, although I learned a lot about stuff from him, as I was alive during the period of post war consensus, but I still recommend a bit of study, as relying on the anecdotes of parents, or on personal anecdotes, is not always a reliable guide to anything. Anyone who says "I do not need to read history" either "because I was there" or (worse) "because I know someone who was there" may sometimes have a problem. I was there, but I do not rely on that. Nationalisation was not just about rebuilding a shattered nation after war. It was also about changing the way in which society was structured, and recognising that there are some things that the market is not always good at. As noted above, some of the so called privatisation has been a bit of a con anyway, with the taxpayer still on the hook for downsides.
Edited by anonymous-user on Tuesday 26th September 17:30
Derek Smith said:
Breadvan72 said:
Keynes was by most accounts a good negotiator and a practical realist, but the US held all the cards and played deliberate hardball in pursuit of wide US policy objectives that were as it turned out very misguided.
I would rate Attlee as the number one PM of the C20 and possibly the number one PM ever. He is up there with Pitt 2, Gladstone, Disraeli, Churchill, and Lloyd George. His cabinet team were mostly fab.
I am sorry for being rude to you about Charles I on another thread, Derek. I was a tad astonished that someone so historically well read as you had been, it seemed to me, blindsided on an important one like that, but (joke!) you get a pass for getting the law of the constitution wrong as you used to be a cozzer (joke!) .
Accepted. It is in the past.I would rate Attlee as the number one PM of the C20 and possibly the number one PM ever. He is up there with Pitt 2, Gladstone, Disraeli, Churchill, and Lloyd George. His cabinet team were mostly fab.
I am sorry for being rude to you about Charles I on another thread, Derek. I was a tad astonished that someone so historically well read as you had been, it seemed to me, blindsided on an important one like that, but (joke!) you get a pass for getting the law of the constitution wrong as you used to be a cozzer (joke!) .
I had a few uncles who were highly politicised. They were fans of Atlee and I took this to mean they were partial. When in my 30s I started to take an interest in modern political history I found that much of what they said was true, particularly the inept management of the economy immediately post WWI. Come the time and all that, but we were lucky that he - and his team - were there.
Churchill was much more profligate and the strong economy, given the state of it in 1945, allowed him to be so. But he wrote the histories, and many academics were reluctant to contradict him.
An empty taxi drew up outside 10 Downing Street and Clement Attlee got out of it.
Breadvan72 said:
johnfm said:
You mean 'net contributor tax payer' funded, yes?
Amazing facktoid: States tend to run on tax. Yikey!Secret factoid: most private sector business also get their money from tax payers. Don't tell!
I know you don't like being corrected. You're amusing factoids don't really disguise the fundamental premise that it isn't 'state' money, but a reallocation of taxpayers' money.
You seem to support increased government allocation of capital. There seems to be ample evidence to suggest they're not very good at it.
I am baffled by your apparent pedantry. State money is money that, absent the State getting some windfall such as conquering Mars or discovering a magic money tree, or selling off the family jewels, comes from taxpayers. Sometimes another State's taxpayers. Some times a State can borrow money, but unless it wants to default it has to use tax and other normal Statey style money sources to pay back the loan (sometimes using tax to repay a loan from a taxpayer, as in the case of a Government debt instrument bought by a tax paying entity). This is not an Earth shattering concept. State money is a shorthand - no one thinks that States have their own money.
Next time you buy something off a private sector trading organisation, by the way, ask yourself two questions: (1) am I a taxpayer? and (2) from whom does that private trading sector organisation get its income stream? So, is private sector money also taxpayer money?
I am really not sure what your point is. Are you one of those "all tax is theft" types?
Next time you buy something off a private sector trading organisation, by the way, ask yourself two questions: (1) am I a taxpayer? and (2) from whom does that private trading sector organisation get its income stream? So, is private sector money also taxpayer money?
I am really not sure what your point is. Are you one of those "all tax is theft" types?
Edited by anonymous-user on Tuesday 26th September 17:37
As a middle aged middle class man brought up by CofE types, married to a practising Catholic I have no idea what cosplay is and those images didn't really assist.
Is it something I'd be best advised not to google on the work pic? Or at all?
Fetches wife's iPad...
Hmmm. Maybe my position and upbringing makes me cosplay material after all.
Is it something I'd be best advised not to google on the work pic? Or at all?
Fetches wife's iPad...
Hmmm. Maybe my position and upbringing makes me cosplay material after all.
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