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vodkat posted:The housing bubble isn't going to pop anytime soon, at least not without a really radical overhaul to the entirety of property and planning law in the UK. When people get all alarmed about the bubble 'popping' what they really mean is that it will stop inflating at its current rate, something that should be a concern for all those that invested in property as an actually investment, but this not something that is going to act as a deflationary pressure on house prices. Prices in London - at least within zone 2 - aren't going anywhere as they are being fuelled by international finance and will remain resilient against anything other than a total global economic meltdown/revolution. For the rest of the UK the problem will be if interest rates rise, threatening the profits of b2l landlords, who will probably panic and put up rents. None of those b2l landlords will be selling their housing thought because that would be to definitely to lose money. So really when the bubble 'pops' it will result in the stagnation of the market, not a crash. Sure this will have ramifications for the rest of the UK economy (bad ones), but housing isn't going to get cheaper anytime in the future and rents will probably rise even more sharply. this is an interesting model of b2l landlord rent-setting behavior
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May 2, 2014 17:19
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one either has a markup pricing model, or a profit maximizing model, but not both, and especially not half and half of each structured so that rents go up or go down no matter what happens
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May 2, 2014 17:29
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depends how the PBoC reacts, really
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May 2, 2014 17:37
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yup: no interest, sharia-consistent investments (no alcohol, etc.)
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May 10, 2014 15:22
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Zephro posted:I think you're underselling the problems of PFI, a lot of which arise from the fact that you have to manage the projects with a contract rather than through a traditional management structure. That requires you to specify everything through the contract. That's impossible, but trying leads to a bunch of absurdities. The canonical example is the two Tube PPPs being required to specify what counted as "litter" (in pursuit of improving the 'ambience' of the stations, one of the three things the private companies were meant to do). The definition they agreed on meant that a discarded paper ticket would be regarded as litter but one that had been ripped into quarters and then thrown away would not. you can't understand the legalism of the PFIs in absence of how New Labour interpreted the reasons for the failure of the previous era of trade union militancy there is a well-established postwar institutional route for the public-private partnership, where an organization employs public funds toward designated ends, but without the complexities of continuous parliamentary oversight or ministerial intervention. It's just the quango, or statutory board. But just as New Labour sought to resolve the accusation of trade unions being undemocratic by enforcing a complex set of internal procedures and restrictions upon trade unions (and messaging that evasions of these rules would be regarded as undemocratic), it sought to resolve the problem of stat boards being sitting ducks for militants by making it bafflingly complex as to who, exactly, industrial action would have to affect in order for strikes to be successful. One could strike against the NCB in alliance with wider sentiment that heating prices were too high or deliveries too unreliable, but it's much harder to strike against Ofgem, the union can only get so much out of the private companies regulated by Ofgem, the public doesn't see "the NCB", it sees their individual energy supplier, and any successful actions to increase energy funding would both bring it into overt conflict with other political groups (e.g., greens) rather than simply calling upon the government to wrangle miracles in the stat board's budget, and form common cause between the employer and labour (because both benefit from increased energy spending) rather than aggravating conflict. that is to say, the legalism of PFIs is an extension of the legalism of labour bargaining, and the legalism of labour bargaining enjoyed support because pro-union New Labourites saw it as a solution to managerial exploitation of ambiguities in promises and anti-union New Labourites saw it as a way to defang militancy. As you've correctly observed, this doesn't really resolve the problems with trying to prevent abuse of ambiguities in contractual specification through more specification. But perhaps expensive legal judo over periodic bargains is still less expensive than expensive strikes over periodic bargains.
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May 12, 2014 14:03
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LemonDrizzle posted:That certainly isn't my intention, and I'm not claiming that PFI is an optimal solution by any stretch of the imagination. However, given that Labour couldn't tax and couldn't borrow on the capital markets during their first term, they didn't exactly have a lot of alternatives; it was PFI or let the infrastructure continue to rot. I struggle to believe that the PPPs were only ever intended as a temporary measure to acquire bonds, given the way they were set up (as long-term partnerships, but with aggressively narrowed options and existence outside of state discretion). I mean, acquiring funding through a credible commitment to only use it for infrastructure rather than welfare/military/generalissimo's Swiss account etc. is a legit public goal, but it's also one with a well-known solution, i.e., a national development bank. Having the supposedly insolvent/incredible state conduct detailed intervention into the behavior of PPPs via contract would undermine the supposed bond-inducing credibility.
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May 12, 2014 14:46
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spoiler alert: they're deffo going to get a larger percentage of the vote than percentage of seats
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May 12, 2014 14:49
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the organization that would run as the Socialist Party in 1997 provided plenty of leadership and visibility due to the poll tax campaign, and the group inherited the network and contacts from Labour (since, after all, it was a Labour splinter faction). And yet this "leading, persuading, educating" failed to resonate. There's only so much you can talk Average Joe into endorsing the mythology built around Clause 4. e: Trickjaw posted:Hang on. Why is Labour on a higher % but with a lower bar on the graph? Are they trying to hoodwink people who do not know about numbers? 
ronya fucked around with this message at 15:22 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 15:18
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Broniki posted:What makes Scottish Labour particularly bad compared to Labour? My family live in the central belt so they've never not voted for them. being caught off-guard when devolution failed to guarantee their supremacy in Scotland - weak links to grassroots and mobilizers, non-charismatic local leaders, that sort of thing. It's very different to merely be a local representative of a national party than to lead a subnational party in your own right
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May 12, 2014 16:49
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LemonDrizzle posted:I'm not too familiar with the typical workings of development banks - would a government be able to keep their borrowing and the costs of whatever guarantees they'd require off the public sector balance sheet in the same way they do/did with PFI projects? yes - the govt can assign different guarantees, bankruptcy processes, and creditor priorities to the development bank, so their bonds exercise a different degree of credibility. Obviously this is then subject to the broader credibility of the rule of law - bonds of sub-Saharan development banks are presumably not worth the paper they're written on - but the debts stay off the public sector balance sheet. but the promise of credibility depends on the clarity provided by putting layers of bureaucracy between the Minister of Finance and the operation of the project being loaned to - the MoF (ideally) only safeguards the government's stake in the bank, and the bank only pursues the solvency of debtors, with the cabinet's other interests (redistribution, armed forces spending, personal largesse) being firewalled by the bank's asset sheet. If you have lots of detailed intervention, then there's no goddamn point. The degree of micromanagement of PPPs in the UK indicates that the governments (Tory then New Labour both) were not really pursuing a surrender of control in order to obtain credibility to creditors, inasmuch as pushing debt off the common fisc and onto specific PFIs in order to use the debt to discipline the PFI public partner and its choice of agents. The NHS and the LEAs can't keep demanding funding for specific projects (which would make it easier for them to summon a political coalition in favour, even if that particular project is not sensible), rather they are given a lump sum and have to maximize its use over the next 30 years. was there ever a credibility problem? The yields on Treasuries across the 90s were pretty darned high, but they were lower than in the late 80s. And PFIs never had interest rates that were dramatically lower than treasury yields.
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May 12, 2014 17:53
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what exactly do you expect an alternate-world Smith government to have done, anyway? Was his relations to the militants any less frosty, for all of Smith's desire to keep the totems of the Labour Party?   At the 1982 NEC Smith was already derided as one of the leaders of the right-wing camp. Of course, in 1982 the militants were supremely overconfident and could not foresee just how badly the following decade was going to thrash them. Now we write paeans to an alternative universe where Prime Minister John Smith preserves Britain against neoliberalization, the neoliberalization of the PS, SDP, etc. notwithstanding. Are we expected to believe that the present carping of the left about the neoliberal betrayal of the Labour party would be any less noisy than the present carping of the French, German, etc. left of the betrayals of their mainstream socialist parties? ronya fucked around with this message at 20:41 on May 12, 2014 |
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May 12, 2014 20:34
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Alecto posted:If I'm not mistaken I did already mention that Smith was definitely on the right of old Labour, but definitely still in old Labour, as opposed to Blair, who would simply not have been found on the spectrum. I don't know about you, but I look for someone who has good policies, not who would stop people's 'carping'. Yes, the left would still complain and cry betrayal, but we'd be significantly to the left of where we are now. By the '90s there was really no way of moving back to the old reference frame (opinion); Thatcher had been too successful, but many feel Blair moved more to the right than was necessary. You mention the French and German old socialist parties, which, really, are good examples. A lot of the continent moved to the right, it does, in retrospect, seem unavoidable. But, we ended up further to the right than most, and that difference is seen by many to be the difference between John Smith and Tony Blair. When centrists deride factionalism what they really mean is 'everyone else should shut up and support my faction' well, hence my question as to what, exactly, the difference were supposed to be. Blair's chief sin seems to be not so much the rejection of Clause IV aspirations, but rubbing New Labour's victory in the faces of the losers. Further right than most? Compared to what? Compared to the Danish Social Democrats outsourcing the fire service to Falck? The Swedish Social Democrats outsourcing the Stockholm metro to a French contractor?
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May 12, 2014 21:45
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A helpful source: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cultural_Marxism which cites http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-all-issues/2003/summer/reframing-the-enemy quote:Television commentator Pat Buchanan says it is being used to "de-Christianize" America. Washington heavyweight William Lind claims it is turning U.S. college campuses into "ivy-covered North Koreas." Retired naval commander Gerald Atkinson fears it has invaded the nation's military academies. Immigration activist John Vinson suggests it aims "to distort and destroy" our country. Breivik blaming it seems to given it a new lease of life in Europe.
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May 14, 2014 09:40
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I had the impression that this thread itself had come to the same conclusion during the disastrous UKIP-LibDem debate
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May 21, 2014 09:55
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then I think you want MMP rather than STV, really
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May 22, 2014 14:25
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TheIllestVillain posted:UK labour saw our labor party experiment with third way and thought it was a good idea the ALP didn't go through quite the same spectacular internal fragmentation and then collapse as the militants did in the UK, but there are similarities - a devotion to conspiracies as an article of faith (Petrov, Kerr), battles to make changes to Party procedure that take away union influence but somehow don't quite capture the fury of the left-wing members, but unsurprisingly produce third-way leaders who do and, also unsurprisingly, can't easily be levered out of the party
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May 23, 2014 15:09
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it is probably a good thing the UKIP is a vehicle for flattering Nigel Farage's ego, or it could probably assemble a much more threatening single-issue anti-immigration coalition out of the CPRE middle england + green antidevelopment types and the racists, of course. But much easier to hide them under the floorboards if your party has more planks
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May 23, 2014 15:20
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but it's cold
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May 23, 2014 15:25
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london is actually a terrible place for a modern city, construction-wise: alluvial silty soils
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May 23, 2014 16:47
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it seems fair to presume that if the labour NEC expelled rahman, rahman might actually be trying to create a political machine in any case, this would hardly be the first time where New Labour fell in love with the idea of empowering a local executive, only to then find that, surprise surprise, it's no longer a secure Labour post (cough all of Scotland cough)
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May 24, 2014 06:41
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sloth doesn't need to freak out about rahman, really taking it as given that it is a nascent political machine (and noting that excluded ethnic/religious/class minorities of all kinds do this when they dominate a local office, white or not; machines are hardly a new phenomenon) - there's nowhere it can go; trying to run from the left of Labour means that the tension between culturally conservative British Bangladeshi activists and the (predominantly white) LGBT and feminist activists is liable to cause incidents. A common cause against Tory cuts can only go so far; Respect is one rape coverup incident from being SWP'd into oblivion. part of trying to convert a passionate fringe into a machine is that Rahman needs to have some tools to discipline his own most passionate supporters when they go too far, and I doubt he has any. fringe parties all have this problem (see: UKIP). ronya fucked around with this message at 08:27 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 08:23
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can I point out that the accusations of ethnic intimidation in Tower Hamlets, specifically, have been advanced in public from the far left since the Respect Party split over the issue a while back sloth's particular choice of phrasing is transparently right-wing dogwhistling, yes, but charges of 'communalism' &c. have been floating around for a bit already. One can doubt the left-wing bona fides of Luftur Rahman without decrying British Muslim representation as intrinsically corrupt e: goddamn autocorrect ronya fucked around with this message at 10:04 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 09:59
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the reason Episode #14512 in the Tower Hamlets brouhaha is particularly interesting is because the relevant actors - including the Respect Party and Lutfur Rahman himself - are labeling themselves as being from the left and claiming intellectual descent from the old anti-Iraq-war alliance if you claim the banner of being the authentic left representation, then of course you deserve scrutiny from those who identify with the left
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May 24, 2014 12:14
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because the dysfunction is dragging a swathe of the left with it despite what you may have heard recently, British Muslims are not actually a majority in any borough, not even in Tower Hamlets, which still has a white plurality. Newham doesn't but it has a large chunk of non-Muslim British Indians there is certainly scope for yelling "wait, he's not far left at all! Stop endorsing him! He's a corrupt Tory clone liquidating public assets at firesale prices to his business buddies!" ronya fucked around with this message at 13:12 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 13:05
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the 2011 'Purple Book' was still pretty hard pro-direct-election of mayors and devolving powers as a solution I wonder whether that'll change?
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May 24, 2014 13:53
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FWIW, from the EC report:quote:While the data reported by the police shows that every UK police force has investigated cases of alleged or suspected electoral fraud in the last three years, it is clear that there are some areas where cases are more frequently reported and therefore investigated.
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May 24, 2014 14:25
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goddamnedtwisto posted:The funny thing is, absent the corruption we've talked about, Lutfur Rahman is actually not doing a bad job in TH. "Soft" services like rubbish collection and street cleaning, adult education and care, and accessibility to services, which are the main things the Mayor has control over, have definitely improved. He managed to save Bancroft Library and - possibly uniquely in the UK - we've opened two new quote:Since the 1960s, some historians have reevaluated political machines, considering them corrupt but efficient. Machines were undemocratic but responsive. They were also able to contain the spending demands of special interests. In Mayors and Money, a comparison of municipal government in Chicago and New York, Ester R. Fuchs credited the Cook County Democratic Organization with giving Mayor Richard J. Daley the political power to deny labor union contracts that the city could not afford and to make the state government assume burdensome costs like welfare and courts. Describing New York [as it eventually later dismantled Tammany Hall], Fuchs wrote, "New York got reform, but it never got good government." eh. Well I don't doubt that centralism produces effective government, but yes, there needs to be more focus on oversight mechanisms. Of course, if the point is that it's effective because it disempowers obstructive councillors rather than empowering the nebulous local community - which, as Labour hoped, would be its own strata of affiliated civil-social NGOs - the question is why one is pursuing extensive devolution at all
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May 24, 2014 14:42
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I would advise against taking sides in this particular argument too aggressively, as it's quite plausible that there is both a degree of electoral fraud and voter intimidation and an excessive perception of its magnitude and curiously disparate attitude in desired enforcement reactions voting is expressive to begin with, so particularly motivated activists being violent in order to obtain a ludicrously small number of votes is quite imaginable. it takes a degree of innovation for this to turn into systemic advantages, but such innovation would tend to leave a paper trail
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May 24, 2014 15:11
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Britain's institutional approach to multiculturalism is a little different from Germany's - a lot of it is the legacy of empire. The ethnic organizations that dominated in the 1970s - Standing Conference of Asian Organisations: the Standing Conference of African Organisations; the Standing Conference of Pakistani Organisations; the West Indian Standing Organisation, &c. - have such names because up until the 1960s the issuance of passports to Commonwealth citizens was the responsibility of the High Commissions in those areas, i.e., the Colonial Office. Therefore those High Comms were responsible for assisting migrants in integrating. That is to say, Britain applied its attitude toward ethnic relations in the wider empire back home. This made more sense than it sounds today, given a great deal of political activity by migrants over politics in their origin countries, especially during the assorted traumas in Pakistan/India/Bangladesh/Sri Lanka over the 60s-80s. That is to say: a social expectation that the ethnic communities will form organizations that nominate representatives, which white Britain then either appoints to a consultative position, or otherwise liaises with in some way, with the concerns of the FO dominating. So, whilst the NGOs endorsed candidates, they did not 'get out the vote' particularly enthusiastically, or rely on running candidates; instead they relied on building a network of contacts in the government or civil service (with a converse understanding by Whitehall that this is right and proper). Conversely the attitude of Whitehall remained paternalistic - e.g., engineering contacts between the (British) Indian Worker's Association and Indian trade unionists in order to pursue British foreign policy wrt Nehru's government. The ethnic model was pretty strong; the American trend of trying to forge larger alliances to participate more actively in protest politics (i.e., civil rights movement style) foundered instead, at least in the 1960s; Citizens Against Racial Discrimination and such sputtered a bit and then folded. Germany undergoing a similar period straightforwardly did not have any such institutional legacy. Germany also treated immigration as a foreign relations matter - i.e., expecting Turkey to somehow deal with the politics of guest workers for them via the Turkish embassy. Duly note that many of the Turkish workers did return to Turkey. The problem was that the tenor of politics shifted and Turkey turned out to not have any ability to oblige Turks who wish to remain in Germany to return. But unlike Britain, Germany couldn't just snap its fingers and find people who are skilled in liaising with the relevant communities on a long-term basis from a government role. Britain could and did recall staff from the High Comms, but Germany couldn't. Conversely there was no understanding amongst Turkish enclaves of a culturally legitimized path to assimilation established by an earlier colonial era. Predictably: very little integration, very little political participation, an intense amount of mutual distrust.
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May 24, 2014 19:19
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tl; dr - the Britain has never really held that to the notion of rigid social partition that will somehow allow the guest workers to not affect the lives of citizens in any unwanted way (a la Germany back then, or Dubai today). rather, its history is one of managed, prescriptive multiculturalism, with the mindset of that management being a classist one (even if executed by Labour, because even Old Labour was pretty dang elitist) the contemporary interpretation of multiculturalism that the place of (say) the British Bangladeshi in Britain should be determined by British Bangladeshi community activists rather than predominantly carved out by movers and shakers at Whitehall is a relatively new one, but that's mainly because the contemporary attitude that the place of anyone in Britain at all should be determined by their community rather than predominantly hammered out at Whitehall is pretty new too. As late as the 1980s (i.e. Thatcher) the government, like previous governments, still perceived ethnic policy as a space for ways to realize broader policy objectives. A lot of Bangladeshis are small business owners - therefore they (or at least their business associations) are consulted when constructing small business policy, and that's how networking with assorted ethnic communities is done. The Caribbean community has specific concerns about the Met - therefore the Met is handed a one-off parliamentary review. The steady elevation of broad-based ethnic integration as a permanent concern into the DLCG is comparatively recent. ronya fucked around with this message at 20:04 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 20:01
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someone tell me how wrong my glib analysis was
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May 24, 2014 20:14
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there's, uh, a reason for the transplantation of a certain brand of british culture to singapore
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May 24, 2014 20:18
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It is a longstanding historical thing: 
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May 24, 2014 20:35
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wait, what are the problems with the gcse/gce that call for a single exam board putting aside the point that the hullabaloo over what would go into the single exam would be completely impossible to navigate
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May 25, 2014 11:37
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I made the point that Britain tacitly moved from an ideological framework where the question of immigration-induced change was tacitly answered in a patriarchal, authoritarian manner - i.e., that change would occur but that state power and establishment consensus politics would resolve any rising conflicts - to a direct challenge of the implicit assertion of the capabilities of the state from both the New Left and the new-ish right (Powellism etc), which is why the question today doesn't seem to have an answer. New Labour straightforwardly saw the beginning and the end of the ethnic integration question as one that could be resolved via civil-social groups and messaging, with only the pure economics reserved as the concern of the state.
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May 25, 2014 12:03
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rural real estate excluding the young locals is heavily tied to the (also relatively recent) formation of rural conservationism, which - because Britons view fellow Britons as 'like themselves' - took the form of a reaction against the infrastructure that was being made to support these changes (the highway revolts), instead of the form of a reaction against the internal migrants moving in and buying out property. Notice that CPREism takes a decidedly different slant when it is rich Saudis moving in - only then is there a voiced complaint that the buyers are failing to integrate.
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May 25, 2014 12:22
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HortonNash posted:A single exam board needn't mean a single rigid exam or syllabus. You could easily make a core + module syllabus that allows schools to tailor the courses to their needs and abilities (not all schools have the same access to facilities, particularly in science and DT). why would that diminish politicization of the material at all
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May 25, 2014 12:23
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I'm not sure Gove put more thought into it than instructing an intern to remove all non-British texts which is a really poorly executed move as is you would think that a competent politician would know that the right move would be to first introduce a $$$$ NEW PROGRAMME $$$$ favouring British texts authors and then making it tempting to switch, therefore making the old curriculum unattractive, which can then be discarded due to 'lack of interest and the overwhelming success of the new syllabus'. Then the budget for the carrots can be slashed. not doing this suggests that Gove is either (1) in the belief that someone, somewhere out there in Middle England will be wowed by Gove's tough-as-nails nationalism in defence of British Literature, or (2) is just really incompetent pick one!
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May 25, 2014 12:35
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I have no doubt the exams were harder, but I cannot see a return to its particular brand of hardness  in any case OCR sets the GCEs and GCSEs for Singapore right now, and they're certainly harder than they are in the UK, so it's not as if the boards can't do it if there is demand for it
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May 25, 2014 12:49
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Here's the other two pages, for completeness, then:  The difficulty is tied to the expected length of answers; as a three-hour paper (36 minutes each), I think 2 to 2.5 pages per question would be about reasonable. The point is not to sketch one or two paragraphs, certainly.
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May 25, 2014 13:06
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