The now-enacted will of (some of) the people

[snowychap]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

I'm not sure that price rises will have much effect

I agree.

Even if/when they do, I doubt that the vast majority will be blaming Brexit.

[blandy]

2 hours ago, darrenm said:

But it'll be far worse for those without capital, so when it hits those hard, it'll hit the older people who have assets to a much lesser extent and have the net effect of making them better off.

Most private pensions have the majority of the money invested overseas. Whenever the pound goes down, private pensions go up. Brexit has been really good for those.

I'm not saying it'll all be roses but I think it's more complicated than you make out above. 

It was the "utterly and completely protected" that I took issue with. Brexit will affect everyone, having a Tory Government affects everyone. Express reading pensioners, rich or poor will be adversely hit for the reasons I gave. As ever, and as you say, the poorer ones are likely to suffer more than the wealthier,  but the wealthier ones are not utterly protected. I don't know where private (or company) pensions are invested, geographically, but I strongly suspect that my pension is invested in a mix of UK FTSE and other funds - I know the predicted retirement pension level has taken a bashing, for example.

I also dislike the notion of generation blaming - whether it's (as a while ago) all that stuff about the youngsters and avocados and coffee, or this example of pensioners. Young people get old (if they're lucky). Each generation has its hardships and its highlights. Pensioners now had to go through post War 2 rationing, the 3 days week, Rampant inflation, negative equity... but they got cheap housing and as a consequence may be asset rich in terms of the value of their houses. Young people now have wider access to higher education, internets, expanded travel and overseas opportunities, a more connected world to grow up in..but can't afford houses and have less job security (though employment overall is apparently at record levels). I guess we can all add experienced highs and lows, ups and downs and make a judgement, whether we do the three yorkshiremen, or point out the problems younger people face today. But dividing based on generation and then blaming and pointing fingers is not something I agree with.

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

5 minutes ago, snowychap said:

I doubt that the vast majority will be blaming Brexit.

I think they have been busy creating the panto villains over the last week.  UVDL / Merkel / Macron / The 27 / Them 

[blandy]

1 hour ago, HanoiVillan said:

Of course the worst off will suffer badly, but then again they always do, and the government don't need their votes, so.

I think they do - it was the Red Wall falling that mostly gave the tories their majority. They need to keep those votes.

[HanoiVillan]

4 minutes ago, blandy said:

I think they do - it was the Red Wall falling that mostly gave the tories their majority. They need to keep those votes.

I think you have either misunderstood who I am referring to when I say 'the worst off' - I mean people who are genuinely feeling the price rise of every item when they go to the supermarket, and are in danger of falling into food poverty - or misunderstood who voted for the Conservatives in 'red wall' seats in 2019, because - hint - it largely wasn't voters who are one weak paycheque from hunger.

Edited December 14, 2020 by HanoiVillan

[blandy]

1 minute ago, HanoiVillan said:

I think you have either misunderstood who I am referring to when I say 'the worst off' - I mean people who are genuinely feeling the price rise of every item when they go to the supermarket, and are in danger of falling into food poverty

Lots and lots of them in the Red Wall.

Quote

The north of England is home to 90 per cent of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the UK, a new Government report shows.

A staggering 19 out of 20 of local authorities with the highest proportion of neighbourhoods among the most deprived in England are based in the north of the country, with the seaside resort of Hastings featuring as the only southern authority in the statistics.

 

[HanoiVillan]

1 minute ago, blandy said:

Lots and lots of them in the Red Wall.

 

Even a brief look at that list - which in itself is not even slightly a suggestion of who voted for which party in 2019 - would reveal that most of those areas did not switch parties in 2019.

[snowychap]

1 minute ago, Amsterdam_Neil_D said:

I think they have been busy creating the panto villains over the last week.  UVDL / Merkel / Macron / The 27 / Them 

There is that but I do think there is also the notion that a lot of people don't take a huge notice of the individual prices on food shopping (the duping on multi-buys and offers is an example of that) and those that do take note of the cost of their shop tend to look at the overall cost and that will largely be blamed on the shops themselves (see the reaction when there was a shortage of fresh veg from Spain a couple of years ago due to the poor weather).

[ml1dch]

3 minutes ago, snowychap said:

...that will largely be blamed on the shops themselves (see the reaction when there was a shortage of fresh veg from Spain a couple of years ago due to the poor weather).

Yep, there are probably quite a few shelf-stackers in for a lot of complaints from morons in the next few months. 

[Xann]

It's one thing being gullible, but if the silence we're seeing here from Brexit turns out to be indicative of a more widespread acquiescence? It's just a green light to a continuation of exploitation by the Eton and parasitic finance scum.

So I'm hoping the silence is tinder drying, before the lied to and wronged kick off against the con merchants running this circus.

Not holding my breath though.

[blandy]

12 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

Even a brief look at that list - which in itself is not even slightly a suggestion of who voted for which party in 2019 - would reveal that most of those areas did not switch parties in 2019.

I dunno - Manchester had some switching seats to the tories, Burnley too, Blackburn/Darwen, Some of Brum changed hands didn't it? Stoke did...I dunno about the others, a mix I guess. Not many of the (former) red wall seats are well off - I mean that was the whole point - all these decades long Labour held seats, where the areas are generally down at heel with significant levels of problems that would (until now) never in a million years go Tory, yet they did. 

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

14 minutes ago, ml1dch said:

Yep, there are probably quite a few shelf-stackers in for a lot of complaints from morons in the next few months. 

Does that happen,  if it does then it's madness. 

It would not happen here (NL) as far as I know. 

 

[bannedfromHandV]

We all keep assuming that at some point, the majority of people are going to suddenly leap to their senses and see Boris et al for what they really are - but they won’t.

In order to do that it would involve an alternate view, or content from an alternate platform, these same people will get their same information from the same places 3 years from now as they do today, they’ll still be insulated in their little bubbles of frustration and hatred, they’ll still have that chip on their shoulder.

Look at the trump fans, there’s no telling them and whilst here in the UK it’s not so militant, it’s still as much entrenched. Then there’s a huge number of people who just don’t take this stuff seriously, they actually feel that finding out who wins Ru Paul’s drag race is more important than who leads the country (true story, and he voted Tory).

[Amsterdam_Neil_D]

Not sure this is relevant but the Price change possibility.

I had that with the Euro.  Not a few % but huge increases,  just flipping the currency in some cases and that was directly the fault of the EU.

Nobody did anything about it and these are increases that will be more or less the same as the UK no deal.

In the end,  what can people do ?

 

[StefanAVFC]

I actually benefit from the pound losing value, back in 2016 I'd get 1 pound for every 6 zloty and I was earning 2100 zloty gross a month.

These days, I get 1 pound for every 4.90 and combining it with a significantly higher salary, I actually have pretty even financial standing with a good amount of people in the UK. 

Still furious about the whole shitshow though.

[Davkaus]

15 minutes ago, Amsterdam_Neil_D said:

 

In the end,  what can people do ?

 

Remember that you were promised "no downsides, just considerable upsides" when you next cast your vote.

[HanoiVillan]

51 minutes ago, blandy said:

I dunno - Manchester had some switching seats to the tories, Burnley too, Blackburn/Darwen, Some of Brum changed hands didn't it? Stoke did...I dunno about the others, a mix I guess. Not many of the (former) red wall seats are well off - I mean that was the whole point - all these decades long Labour held seats, where the areas are generally down at heel with significant levels of problems that would (until now) never in a million years go Tory, yet they did. 

What we know of switchers mostly comes from the British Election Study, which reveals that more than two-thirds of switchers were either retired or in full-time employment, which are people who are unlikely to be highly food-insecure. It is true that many of the northern constituencies that switched have lower-than-average incomes, but they also have lower-than-average costs of living as well. Because the Conservatives won on a big swing, they won lots of all different types of voters, but it doesn't follow that the lowest income people within the constituency are now crucial to their majorities. You can find some useful basic analysis of switchers here: https://www.brightoncafe.com/2020/03/labour-to-conservative-vote-switchers.html

There is an important point here about 'the red wall', too, which is that it has become a term with a wide variety of meanings that can obscure more than it illuminates. There are really three buckets of seats across the north and Midlands that Labour lost in 2019:

1. Bellwether marginals (eg. Crewe, Bury South) which often switch hands and go to whichever party is benefitting from a swing. These were not originally part of 'the red wall' as originally understood (because of course they could not be considered 'reliably Labour' by definition) but have subsequently been included in it by a gradual blurring of the term's meaning;
2. Seats with a high leave vote but also mostly comparatively high levels of deprivation. These are the ones you are talking about I think. There are two types of these, ones where a Labour loss was highly predictable (such as the seats in Stoke where Labour have been in decline for a long time), and ones where it was much less so (eg the two West Bromwich seats, which are kind of incredible when we remember that the Tories don't have a single seat on Sandwell council). There are maybe two dozen of these seats, especially if we include Wales as well, so they are not unimportant, but they aren't the difference between a majority and not, and we don't have to assume that because the seat is deprived, that must mean that all or most of the switchers are also deprived.
3. A group of seats where Labour has been in long-term secular decline from a very high base. Examples here include Bishop Auckland, North-West Durham and Bolsover. These seats are not particularly deprived. If you look at the list of constituencies by index of multiple deprivation (available here: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7327/), you will see that few of these seats feature in the 100 most deprived constituencies. Incomes may be below-average, but home ownership is high and the cost of living is low, so while leaving may be hard, the average voter cannot be considered seriously deprived or food-insecure. These are the seats that best fit the definition of 'the red wall' (ie, they are 'ancestrally Labour' in that they voted Labour out of proportion to their demographics, for cultural and historic reasons, mostly because they are located on former coalfields).

The broader point is that it is a huge, and I think deeply misleading, generalisation to suggest that because there was a big shift in northern constituencies, therefore people who are deeply deprived and food insecure are now critical to the Tories' next majority. The data we have does not support that conclusion.

[blandy]

15 minutes ago, HanoiVillan said:

The broader point is that it is a huge, and I think deeply misleading, generalisation to suggest that because there was a big shift in northern constituencies, therefore people who are deeply deprived and food insecure are now critical to the Tories' next majority. The data we have does not support that conclusion.

I don't think I said that they were "critical". My point was (and it is supported by your data) that the votes of people in the Red wall seats are needed by the Government. You say there are "maybe two dozen" of these red wall seats with high levels of deprivation - just turning round those seats takes the Tories from 80 majority to 32 majority and given that they are now mostly marginal seats, the Tories do (IMO) need every vote they can get from these. You're right we don't know how individual voters in those seats voted or how poor or wealthy each voter was, but we do know they are amongst the most deprived places, and so voters there are statistically more likely to suffer from that deprivation.

I'm confident that both Labour and the tories know these seats and those voters are needed - hence all the "levelling up" stuff from Bunter, and the approach from Starmer that people are complaining/commenting about in this thread - too Brexity, or too slow to condemn this, or abstaining on that...

We can see already that both parties are analysing and targetting those voters. They need them. And those voters need the parties to address their circumstances. 

[sidcow]

6 hours ago, blandy said:

That’s completely untrue. Staggeringly wrong. I’m surprised you’ve said it.  It’s wrong on multiple levels  it’s wrong because pensioners with assets or without assets use and rely on the NHS probably more than anyone else apart from those with babies. It’s wrong because they use public transport proportionately more than other groups  it’s wrong because with more free time places like village, town and city centres having places to meet and socialise, having libraries, cafes, shops open is more important- go to an out of town mall and it’s all younger people, go to a town high street and it’s more the older demographic. Post offices, greengrocers, libraries, bus routes and so on closing down because of lack of local government money, high rents, austerity  - it hits the elderly particularly hard.

Then there’s interest rates. Asset owners with no wage are reliant on savings and savings interest for part or all of their income. Low interest rates benefit borrowers, but hit savers and asset holders.  And while the (very low) state pension is protected against inflation, company and other pension types are not.

Next of course is “political actions”  or “voting” . In being much more likely to vote, pensioners once every few years get a voice that is actually listened to, that their actions carry collective weight for them so that the consequences of their voting have impact which perhaps helps rebalance a bit of the ageism.

Asset rich pensioners are the ones going to Spain and the South of France or with second homes abroad. And they’re the ones giving or loaning or bequeathing money to their kids and grandkids when they can’t afford housing or other bills. They are also often free babysitters, child minders and so on in lieu of over priced crèches.

so apart from the NHS, public services, interest rates, inflation, foreign travel freedoms, transport, exchange rates, stock market falls, care homes, pandemic handling....

 

On pensions.  The stock market is taking a hammering at the moment.  It had just started to recover from Covid and as soon as the no deal talk started it plunged again.  Pensioners will get hit hard by that. 

Edited December 14, 2020 by sidcow

[blandy]

Just now, sidcow said:

Don't forget pensions.  The stock market is taking a hammering at the moment.  It had just started to recover from Covid and as soon as the no deal talk started it plunged again.  Pensioners will get hit hard by that. 

I didn't - they're in there