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

[colhint]

19 minutes ago, StefanAVFC said:

Right so, lets analyse this.

If we need to wait until 2040 to see any benefit, then a large percentage of those who voted for it will probably be gone, and the ones who didn't want it will be older.

So great, if it's an absolute disaster (which I see zero chance of not happening so far) we got absolutely screwed by those who won't even be there to see it.

Boomer generation - got everything handed on a plate to them, while acting like they know it all.

And anyway, the % of leave voters who voted leave for a change in 23 years will be monumental. I'm wagering more than a minority thought we could start kicking people out on June 24th 2016.

good job boomer generation invented the internet otherwise we,d never had had this chat

Edited October 15, 2017 by colhint

[Chindie]

1 minute ago, colhint said:

Just a question. If economics is not your forte, how can you call austerity foolhrady?

As said, it's generally held that you spend your way out of recession. Obviously, it's more complicated than that in reality, but generally it's accepted.

By forte I mean I'm not an expert, my interest was always politics rather than economics though obviously there's a crossover. Are you?

[StefanAVFC]

Asking from a position of total ignorance -  are there any recorded examples of austerity working?

[tonyh29]

8 minutes ago, Chindie said:

As said, it's generally held that you spend your way out of recession. Obviously, it's more complicated than that in reality, but generally it's accepted.

Doesn’t that lead to inflation followed by a higher level of unemployment .... wasn’t  that why Callaghann had to go cap in hand to the IMF back in 76 ?  

[colhint]

Not really, other than the fact that anyone who has ever tried something different  ,over a period of a decade, unless they are sitting on a wealth of minerals, has ever been in the top 10, wealthiest countries in the world, ever.

[Chindie]

13 minutes ago, tonyh29 said:

Doesn’t that lead to inflation followed by a higher level of unemployment .... wasn’t  that why Callaghann had to go cap in hand to the IMF back in 76 ?  

Did you see, Tony, the bits were I said things like 'generally', 'more complicated than that'?

Austerity often has poor outcomes as well. I'm sure you can pull some smug examples.

Edit- the same IMF in the last recession encouraged spending by governments to try to nix the issue ASAP.

Edited October 15, 2017 by Chindie

[tonyh29]

31 minutes ago, StefanAVFC said:

Asking from a position of total ignorance -  are there any recorded examples of austerity working?

Well kind of

its a long article but the LSE suggest it did work in some countries for the last crises 

Quote

acloser inspection of the empirics of the austerity–growth relationship in Europe during the crisis (section 3) reveals a range of cases where fiscal consolidation was attained concurrently with positive growth rates (Germany, Estonia, Malta, Austria, Slovakia, Slovenia, etc)

 

ill be honest I skipped read a lot of it (it s late and im kinda watching the tv ) but it seems to suggest that the austerity doesn’t work line that was peddled seems to have stemmed from data skewed by Greece being so off the scale , remove Greece and the picture looked much better ?

 

Edited October 15, 2017 by tonyh29

[tonyh29]

4 minutes ago, Chindie said:

Did you see, Tony, the bits were I said things like 'generally', 'more complicated than that'?

Austerity often has poor outcomes as well. I'm sure you can pull some smug examples.

Edit- the same IMF in the last recession encouraged spending by governments to try to nix the issue ASAP.

Smug ...oh the irony

oh well , as I said to the other guy that seemed to want to make it personal 

and we’re done 

[Xann]

8 minutes ago, colhint said:

Just a question. If economics is not your forte, how can you call austerity foolhardy?

We're hurting millions to save billions, when we'd save trillions by bombing the handful of people to whom everyone owes money, instead of the Syrians.

That's one take on it, there may be others?

[darrenm]

17 minutes ago, tonyh29 said:

Doesn’t that lead to inflation followed by a higher level of unemployment .... wasn’t  that why Callaghann had to go cap in hand to the IMF back in 76 ?  

Not sure about employment but yes inflation has to be controlled by... Taxation! Hence the tax and spend stuff.

The well founded and accepted economics 101 stuff is that you spend then increase taxes to control inflation, generating more growth and revenue, allowing more spending. It's a Catherine wheel to grow the economy. Standard Keynesian I believe.

Austerity has the opposite effect, it seizes the wheel up because you've put the fireworks out.

[Chindie]

4 minutes ago, tonyh29 said:

Smug ...oh the irony

oh well , as I said to the other guy that seemed to want to make it personal 

and we’re done 

We most definitely are.

[darrenm]

52 minutes ago, StefanAVFC said:

I'm not as optimistic.

For some reason, no deal is seemingly a realistic option which would totally **** us short/medium term with not much long term optimism either.

I'm going @Chindie here with my conviction. Absolutely no chance. I still think eventually article 50 will be multilaterally revoked but for now, we're definitely not leaving without a deal. The hard liners are becoming ever more isolated and they have no economic argument left. The amendment to the exit bill specifically says to give the house the final vote. That amendment will sail through, and if it comes to it, a bad exit deal will be voted down. Where we go from there will be interesting. No confidence in May and a GE?

[Chindie]

I still lean towards no deal happening because it's short term politically the easiest option. Long term it's a dreadful option, but I've no faith in the Tories doing anything right. The idiot self interest party.

[meregreen]

With the Tories, it’s always Party before country. 

[bickster]

3 hours ago, meregreen said:

With the Tories, it’s always Party before country. 

With the Tories it’s always self interest before anything else, hence why the vast majority are actually saying very little and keeping their heads well below the parapet right now

[bickster]

Quote

It may sound a bit stupid, I know, but last year my school decided to offer our students a referendum on having homework. There’d been a vocal minority going on and on about it for ages, and the head thought that it’d be a good chance to air the arguments properly and shut them up for good, because we didn’t want the issue distracting work indefinitely. Plus, there was an inspection coming and I think he thought it would end up making him look good: he’d offer a vote no one thought he could lose, lay out the arguments, win and come out stronger.

Unfortunately, things didn’t quite go to plan.

One of the deputy heads - people know he’s always had his eye on the top job - thought it’d be good to come out on the ‘abandon homework’ side. He’s one of those teachers who plays the clown role - which the kids love, even though they don’t learn that much - but he’s also more devious than that. Chances are he didn’t think abandoning homework was actually a good thing, nor that there was any chance of winning, but it would shake things up a bit, and potentially get him closer to bringing down a weak head.

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Now, there’s no doubt that homework could do with reforming, now that the school wasn’t actually working as well as it should for lots of the students, even though homework wasn’t really the reason for that.

One of the teaching assistants had been one of the ones giving everyone a hard time about it, constantly sniping, telling kids that homework was an imposition, a total waste of their time, who were the teachers to tell them what to do... even though he’d done it as a kid, and reaped the benefits. He was so rich he didn’t even need to be a TA, but kept trying different ways to wheedle his way into the school, and was using discontent about how school wasn’t working for some of the less well off kids to push his own agenda, telling them that the real problem was homework, that this simple act of getting rid of homework was the solution to all their problems.

The vast majority of the staff saw that homework was - in the long run - generally a pretty good thing, and was worth sticking with. But try telling that to some of the pupils. Especially with this buffoon of a deputy now going round with the TA, announcing how incredible life would be once the tyranny of homework had been lifted. ‘Think of all the things you’ll be able to do with that time you’ve now got back!’ they kept shouting.

Then there was the leader of the teaching union, who never quite said what he believed, but was nervous because lots of the people who supported his work to try to sort out the complex issues to do with the school not working equally for everyone were now siding with the TA and coming out as anti-homework.

So in the midst of all this we did our best to present the arguments, to use our professional experience to explain that not doing homework might seem like a great idea, but that to do well you had to do the work sometime, and leaving homework behind would likely mean doing worse. But this was denounced as fear-mongering; “we’ve had enough of experts,” one actually said, and the kids just lapped this up, so each time you tried to explain something carefully, a bunch of them would just laugh and say we were just trying to scare them into sticking with homework.

The most difficult thing of it all was that there’s always been some pupils who’ve just hated homework. They pretty much hate anything that teachers say anyway, and will take any chance to give us a bloody nose, but they just don’t see why they should do homework, even though we can see the good that it’s doing them. What’s worried people is that this lot - the ones who have least interest in school and are most likely to jump up and celebrate no homework - are actually the ones who could be hit worst if homework goes and results suffer. But try to raise this, and you get accused of patronising them, of labelling them stupid, incapable of grasping the complex issues in play... even though the ‘abandon homework’ side summarily failed to explain in any detail how a post-homework school would sustain its results and help those who were most vulnerable. ‘It’ll just be better,’ they’d say. ‘We’ll all be happier. It’ll be amazing. Plus - think of all we’ll be able to do with all that time we’ll get back!’

So the whole debate descended into chaos, with neither side doing what it should have done, and people got more and more nervous. And, well, we went into the vote, and would you believe it, it came in 52% for abandoning homework, and 48% for sticking with it.

You should have seen the face of that deputy head. The fool. Never thought ‘abandon’ would actually win, and here he is, bloodless the next day, having to actually live with the consequences. The head quit, which was a bit pathetic, but then people turned on the deputy, and he didn’t get the job either. So now we’re lumped with this robot from the ranks of middle leaders, a woman who actually didbelieve in homework, but now bangs on incessantly about respecting democracy, insisting that there’s no nuance, no going back, no chance to reconsider: no homework means no homework.

Half the students are overjoyed, while half can’t believe it. It wasn’t that they could even opt to do homework now - because other people had voted to get rid of it, they weren’t allowed to do it. Not only that, people kept telling them to get over it, to cheer up and stop talking the school down.

Except, the longer this has gone on, the more ridiculous it has got. The TA immediately quit, saying he’d done what he came to do, and has swanned off to enjoy his big house and fat bank account, leaving a total mess. Turns out no one had done any planning for what a post-homework school would look like anyway. None. So while there’s all this uncertainty, the reputation of the school is tanking. People are going elsewhere.

What’s most ridiculous though is that over 85% of teachers were solidly in favour of homework, and had generally thought quite a bit about it. But now, after the vote, many of them are so terrified about losing their jobs at the next inspection that they’re running around telling their classes that they now accept the vote and that they’ll work tirelessly to create a successful post-homework school... even though none of them actually believe that such a thing will be as good as what we had, and could take years of poor results to even come close to achieving.

As for the students... well they enjoyed having their vote and sticking two fingers up to the teachers. And quite frankly we probably deserved it in many ways. But as things have gone on, the reality is starting to hit. The promise of this golden age where they’d get all this time back to do amazing things with faded almost immediately. Now it looks like the school day is going to have be massively extended. So while there’ll technically be ‘no homework,’ kids will end up having to work harder for longer to get the same results.

Normally, when a head comes in and proposes some crazy policy, you eventually get a chance to move them on, because that’s how democracy works. But apparently that’s not an option here, because we have to ‘respect democracy.’ So one vote, that’s it, no chance to think again, no chance to say ‘wait, hold on, this might not be such a great idea...’ even when all of those who came in and told people it would be wonderful have now disappeared, are doing nothing to implement this paradise they’d promised.

Gutting really. This was a wonderful school. It had its issues, and had plenty to sort out in terms of things in its history, and definitely things to work on to make the school work better for everyone, but there was a hope that it might be able to do that. Now though? It’s grim. We’re being led by someone who believes in homework, but won’t say so, in case the union leader who probably doesn’t believe in homework takes over, even though he’s coming to realise that following the ‘no homework’ people won’t win him enough support to become head, so is now a no-homework guy saying that a bit of homework is probably good.

Of course, when the leaders won’t actually say what they think, the pupils hate them even more than they did before. But now no one is going to give anyone a referendum again, because no one knows what the hell to believe any more, or what way people might vote. But what can we do? Watch the school drive itself over a cliff, apparently. And smile while we do so.

24

My School Had A Referendum On Getting Rid Of Homework, And It Didn’t Quite Go To Plan (Huff Post Blog)

[mjmooney]

9 hours ago, StefanAVFC said:

I do find it amusing how the generation in their 50s and 60s who avoided the war, got handed free education, cheap housing, continuously tell our generation how easy we have it and tell us how they know better.

Don't worry, we'll mostly be dead by 2040. 

[veloman]

8 hours ago, darrenm said:

 It's a Catherine wheel to grow the economy. Standard Keynesian I believe.

 

Yep; long time since I had to study Macro economics (ACCA) but I think that it is/was called 'The Multiplier. Didn't that theory go out of the window under our altruistic friend Thatcher ?

[ml1dch]

8 hours ago, darrenm said:

I'm going @Chindie here with my conviction. Absolutely no chance. I still think eventually article 50 will be multilaterally revoked but for now, we're definitely not leaving without a deal. The hard liners are becoming ever more isolated and they have no economic argument left. The amendment to the exit bill specifically says to give the house the final vote. That amendment will sail through, and if it comes to it, a bad exit deal will be voted down. Where we go from there will be interesting. No confidence in May and a GE?

Nice and optimistic, and definitely not impossible but I would wager it's unlikely. There is still too much chaos that can be conjured up.

There are enough hard-line nutcases to bring everything crashing down if the wind moves in the direction you outline. 48 MPs are needed to trigger a leadership challenge, and they easily have the numbers to make that happen. They've got this close, they're not going to let it all go without one last throw of the dice.

Then you're into whittling down candidates,  and there wouldn't be the numbers to get the final two to be from the same faction. So it wouldn't be Hammond Vs Rudd that is put to the members. Johnson doesn't seem to have any support within the party, so it would probably be Hammond against either Davies or somebody from the backbenches (with Rees-Mogg the obvious), and the members won't vote for Hammond in a million years.

Once they have the lunatic candidate in number ten, all they have to do is suspend the talks. Say that we're not doing anything until they do. Then the clock ticks down with nothing to vote on.

Your scenario relies on the Eurosceptic wing of the Tory party being happy with how you see it playing out.

[darrenm]

23 minutes ago, veloman said:

Yep; long time since I had to study Macro economics (ACCA) but I think that it is/was called 'The Multiplier. Didn't that theory go out of the window under our altruistic friend Thatcher ?

Yeah trickle down which turns out sucks up