People with lower education level have a smaller pool of jobs available. Those overlap with people traveling for work from places with a lower economic standard. A lack of migrant workers means higher wages and more opportunity.
It's why few on here get projects from upwork. A select few can specialize and demand US market rates while most compete with individuals happy to make $5 US an hour.
Growing the economy doesn't mean it is going to trickle to the poorest. Often a country with a high growth rate has a large divide between rich and poor. Often a slower growth country funnels that wealth to the lowest in society.
Either there is good information out there to back up your position already, in which case just link to it and we'll check it out, or you are very confident in your position without information to back it up, in which case we don't have any compulsion to believe you to be correct.
Statements that can be made without good evidence can be rightly dismissed just as easily.
You have given us nothing to counter? At least nothing but vague hand-wavey rhetoric.
Costing the UK overall $178bn is going to harm us all in the long run, so the initial article is your starter for ten.
If you want us to give a reasoned counter to your position, you first need to properly describe your position. Spouting “well you haven't cited sources either” when we ask you to cite sources is playground stuff, in a similar vein: show us yours and we'll show you ours. If you make claims and refuse to substantiate them, then complain that a counter isn't sufficiently substantiated, it isn't us that looks like they don't know how to properly discus things.
> While wages are currently growing at a relatively fast pace, high inflation is currently cancelling this growth out, leading to the negative growth in real terms throughout 2022 and early 2023. Although it is likely that UK inflation peaked in October 2022, at 11.1 percent it has yet to fall below double figures as of March 2023. Forecasts from the Spring 2023 budget predict that the annual UK inflation will average out at 6.1 percent in 2023, before falling to 0.9 percent in 2024. Falling wages is just one of the aspects of the current Cost of Living Crisis, which has led to the steepest fall in living standards in a generation
This is like a “sun rises again” story. Of course the mayor of London still hates brexit. Just like the rest of the ruling class and their lackeys in the media.
Do you have any sources for that claim? The credible estimates have a net loss on the order of 4-7% over a few years, and there’s no expectation that will reverse in the foreseeable future.
That's for the country. Then they divide by population and claim everyone is $1,000 poorer. The elite class would reap the benefits and the poorer class would have wages kept even lower.
If everyone including corporation's wealth were equally shared then yes you are correct. But in reality it's the opposite.
If the rich could import unlimited people wages would go to almost nothing. The economy would grow because the country as a whole would grow. But it makes the average person worse off.
Cheaper services benefit the rich averaged across everyone it's 1,000. For example saving $10,000 on lawncare means 9 poor families can not benefiting and the headline is still correct. In reality they save 20,000 and those poor families are 1,000 worse off.
I'd love too see some well researched stats to back that up. Otherwise I'm calling that complete bunkum.
Increasing prices, even before the inflationary pressure caused by outside forces in the last year or so, have more than eaten any increase on average salary. The extra jobs vacated by EU citizens we've made officially less welcome are mostly jobs people don't want so instead of increased employment we've got seasonal work & other "unskilled" work not being done, and low paid but high stress jobs (nursing care etc.) also going unfilled. Other vacant jobs are in areas we have not yet made up the skills shortfall in (have you tried to get a plumber in recently?).
The wealthier "class" is doing perfectly fine and knew they would be, that is why so many of them told big porkies to convince others to vote that way.
Jobs no one wants? These are the jobs that the average person still needs (nevermind wants). I have been a plumbers assistant, a plumber's job is a job that could give the average person a goodlife. The problem is the rich want to pay someone as cheap as possible. Those farm workers don't even get minimum wages and live like modern day indentured slaves. Give them a FAANG salary and work culture and you will get millions applying
You have conflated two of my points on jobs incorrectly.
Plumbers and other such jobs are some that we currently lack the skilled people to sufficiently fill. Still. This many years after brexit.
And while the working conditions of many seasonal jobs are far from good, sometimes blatantly illegal, where the jobs have been filled it is more expensively (one of the factors, a number of them due to the effects of brexit, fuelling those price rises that counter any wage rises that have happened), and where they haven't crops have gone unharvested causing waste and, surprise, fueling price rises this time due to lack of supply.
Plumbing is not a job no one wants. Picking strawberries is. Being a bin man is.
> Those farm workers don't even get minimum wages and live like modern day indentured slaves. Give them a FAANG salary and work culture and you will get millions applying
Where will the money for paying those salaries come from?
Of course the problem is the rich class wanting to exploit workers, that's something we know since before Marx, hence why he wrote Das Kapital...
Maybe so, but could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
GDP is a terrible indicator of a country's real wealth. Of course Britain's economic output fell after Brexit - it's trading less with the EU! That doesn't mean the UK is poorer or has "cost" them anything. Sadiq Khan is constantly making bold, unsubstantial statements like this - definitely a politician for the Twitter era.
All anecdotal measures of household wealth I can see are down. Public services are crumbling (some literally): roads, hospitals, schools, NHS is in tatters on all possible metrics, and with people departing in droves. Everyone I speak to has had their personal household budget squeezed hard.
Or course it's just anecdata and also at this level you can't disentangle the effect of COVID and global inflation from Brexit, but it's not a pretty picture for UK prosperity right now.
It's not trading less with the EU. This is a myth. Trade ratios between EU and RoW haven't shifted after Brexit.
British GDP is lower now because of lockdowns. Brexit itself appears to have made no difference. The governments own trade statistics show this clearly.
You’re completely incorrect. Trade by volume is massively down between the UK/EU. Trade by value is similar because of the effects of inflation. Once you adjust for that, you see a huge drop.
Yes, but not proportionally so. Trade is down because of the damage of lockdowns. If it were due to Brexit you'd see trade with the EU fall more than trade with the rest of the world. We don't see that. The ratio of trade with EU vs everywhere else hasn't moved.
Because it's done. It would have been lovely is Keir had been the leader instead of Corbyn before it happened, then taking a principled stance could have made a difference. Unfortunately the past is what it is, and now Brexit is a political third rail for a party that's looking to cruise into a historic victory over the Tories.
The Tories have been so incompetent, unloveable and at times criminal that they've alienated a shocking number of British voters; the polls are predicting a slaughter. So all Labour has to do is... not screw up.
Key voters don’t want to relitigate Brexit. Either they support it in principle (yes, these people still exist), or they fear reopening the blazing rows they had over it, or they’re not ready to admit they were wrong.
To get into a strong position, Labour needed to come out strong on “Brexit is decided” in 2019. Remember that they just lost a catastrophic election on exactly this topic. To tell the public they were all wrong was to guarantee electoral oblivion. They had to come out so strongly, in fact, that it would be decried as a huge U-turn if they did that now. And it would stick.
The EU won’t let the UK join until the Conservative Party are also pro-EU. They don’t want to negotiate reentry only to have the Tories rip us straight back out after they get reelected.
Rejoining takes time in any case. The UK is in an absolute shambles, so Labour have to focus on those immediate improvements if they want to get elected then reelected.
Although I'm not a Starmer fan, the actual reason he doesn't want to publicly re-open the topic is that he's smart enough to realize that it would be a disaster for the pro-EU left.
Right now the Brexit debate in the UK is frozen in time. Remainers in particular haven't changed their ideas about it since 2016. If the topic were to be reopened in a big way (e.g. second referendum) then people would become aware of or reminded of many things the establishment would prefer people forget.
For example, this claim by Khan is economic. Remainers generally aren't aware of how badly their economic predictions failed, so continue to believe this kind of claim. But if Starmer were to make a big public position out of trying to undo Brexit, the people who campaigned for it would reawaken and refocus on it (e.g. Farage). They are more popular than Starmer and people listen to them. They would then systematically revisit the claims of the pro-EU establishment and point out how drastically wrong they were about everything. They would imply or outright assert that it was deliberate. And a lot of people - the majority - would agree with them, given what's happened in the years since.
For example, Remainer MPs promised the public there would be a massive recession at the moment of leaving caused by uncertainity. The economy grew instead. You can't be more wrong than that. Then they promised that actually leaving would be chaotic. Most people didn't even notice anything had changed. Then they promised that it would be destructive to trade with the EU, yet trade ratios haven't changed [1]. Then they promised that the UK would be frozen out of international programmes, be "alone" without friends, and sneered at Brexiteer claims that cooperation would continue as being "cakeism". In fact the UK has rejoined the few European programmes it actually wanted, like the Horizon research programme, something that academics and the EU formerly assured Brits would be impossible.
Even the guy who negotiated Brexit for the EU side has adopted Brexiteer positions in the years since.
But the politics of Michel Barnier have, it is fair to say, moved on. Tough controls on immigration; a restricted role for European courts and a new politics of patriotism: these are the eyebrow-raising new demands of the EU’s former chief Brexit negotiator.
[...]
“The first chapter of my book is entitled ‘A warning’,” says Barnier, holding up an elegant yellow-jacketed French edition. “People in the bubble of Brussels think they are always right,” he says. “They don’t want to listen. They don’t want to change anything. This is precisely the way to provoke more Brexits elsewhere in Europe. I’m not a federalist. I’ve never been a federalist. I’m a Gaullist and I’m still on the same track – a patriot and a European. And I’m a European in addition to being a patriot and not instead of being a patriot. As the former Brexit negotiator and as a French politician I will draw the lessons of Brexit, OK?”
Remainers are for now happy stewing in their 2016-era bubble where none of this ever happened. Starmer would like to keep them on side, which means keeping them there, which means being very careful about what he does or does not say in public.
Brit here. I left the UK in large part due to Brexit. Luckily I've so far had professional enough employment overseas (Germany) that I am able to do so, but I feel terrible for the 20 year olds back home who don't have skills and who can't just bugger off and wash dishes in Europe like I did when I was their age. Others?
I can understand the motives of Brexit supporters, even though I believe the campaign to leave was itself a massive hack. What I cannot understand is how poorly Brexit was handled. One would think that such a drastic change should take 10 years or more to prepare for.
The problem is that the idea was fundamentally fraudulent. There was no conceivable way to deliver the promised financial gains, so everyone sensible refused to put their name on a plan and it rotated through a cast of people who were ideological/foolish enough to proceed anyway.
There is also powerlessness in front of change (that hit every other EU country, save maybe the nordic ones) and the feeling of declassment, that you're not middle class anymore.
The UK might feel it more the last one than other EU countries though. I only went to Leeds and London, but the build quality of non-bourgeois houses is not good, almost US-grade imho (not a dig: you don't need good windows/insulation/coating when you're living in California, you do when you're in the UK). Which is a problem when the house wasn't refitted in 50 years.
It's not ultimately the EU fault, but it failed to uphold the promise of citizen protection and growing together at the same pace. Also, Brexit made EU a lot more resilient and refocused on citizen/consumer protection (despite the "but think of the children" crowd trying its utmost to pass the dumbest laws in the world).
For such a controversial position, what does it mean to work on a 10-year discussion with the EU over leaving when all the meanwhile your population's mood may go up and down?
From the perspective of short-lived politicians, something only happens if it happens on your watch.
To implement Brexit required competence. If you were competent, you realised Brexit was insane and would refuse to implement it. Therefore, only the incompetent and unscrupulous would take charge to implement Brexit.
This is the cost of leaving behind a critical mass of people from the gains of globalization.
Everyone is worse off, including the poor who voted for this, but they would have some amount of schadenfreude against the rich who are more worse off as a percentage.
Care to back this claim with data? Not that I doubt it necessarily but I have the opposite impression. The rich tend to not be bound by country lines to get richer and I'm not sure how Brexit would suddenly make that happen.
I'm assuming it's tautological due to the top 1% owning most of the economy.
I mention percentages because on an absolute scale, the ultra wealthy aren't impacted by percentage changes in wealth, the poor are (because they have no buffer).
> "Khan, a member of the opposition Labour Party, which voted against Brexit in a 2016 referendum, based his statement on a report he commissioned from economic consultants Cambridge Econometrics, who estimated how fast the economy would have grown if Britain had voted to stay in the EU."
So a made up prediction that he paid for. That's not very convincing given that self-proclaimed economic experts also confidently predicted:
- 500k-800k job losses in an immediate recession following the vote if Leave won
- A loss of trade with the EU upon leaving the single market
... neither of which actually happened. The economy grew after the vote, and today the ratio of EU to non-EU trade the UK engages in hasn't changed from before Brexit, which strongly implies the single market was actually useless for Britain in the end.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadIt's why few on here get projects from upwork. A select few can specialize and demand US market rates while most compete with individuals happy to make $5 US an hour.
Growing the economy doesn't mean it is going to trickle to the poorest. Often a country with a high growth rate has a large divide between rich and poor. Often a slower growth country funnels that wealth to the lowest in society.
Statements that can be made without good evidence can be rightly dismissed just as easily.
Costing the UK overall $178bn is going to harm us all in the long run, so the initial article is your starter for ten.
If you want us to give a reasoned counter to your position, you first need to properly describe your position. Spouting “well you haven't cited sources either” when we ask you to cite sources is playground stuff, in a similar vein: show us yours and we'll show you ours. If you make claims and refuse to substantiate them, then complain that a counter isn't sufficiently substantiated, it isn't us that looks like they don't know how to properly discus things.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/933075/wage-growth-in-th...
> While wages are currently growing at a relatively fast pace, high inflation is currently cancelling this growth out, leading to the negative growth in real terms throughout 2022 and early 2023. Although it is likely that UK inflation peaked in October 2022, at 11.1 percent it has yet to fall below double figures as of March 2023. Forecasts from the Spring 2023 budget predict that the annual UK inflation will average out at 6.1 percent in 2023, before falling to 0.9 percent in 2024. Falling wages is just one of the aspects of the current Cost of Living Crisis, which has led to the steepest fall in living standards in a generation
https://obr.uk/box/the-outlook-for-household-income-and-cons...
If everyone including corporation's wealth were equally shared then yes you are correct. But in reality it's the opposite.
If the rich could import unlimited people wages would go to almost nothing. The economy would grow because the country as a whole would grow. But it makes the average person worse off.
In any case, feel free to provide your alternative analysis.
Increasing prices, even before the inflationary pressure caused by outside forces in the last year or so, have more than eaten any increase on average salary. The extra jobs vacated by EU citizens we've made officially less welcome are mostly jobs people don't want so instead of increased employment we've got seasonal work & other "unskilled" work not being done, and low paid but high stress jobs (nursing care etc.) also going unfilled. Other vacant jobs are in areas we have not yet made up the skills shortfall in (have you tried to get a plumber in recently?).
The wealthier "class" is doing perfectly fine and knew they would be, that is why so many of them told big porkies to convince others to vote that way.
Plumbers and other such jobs are some that we currently lack the skilled people to sufficiently fill. Still. This many years after brexit.
And while the working conditions of many seasonal jobs are far from good, sometimes blatantly illegal, where the jobs have been filled it is more expensively (one of the factors, a number of them due to the effects of brexit, fuelling those price rises that counter any wage rises that have happened), and where they haven't crops have gone unharvested causing waste and, surprise, fueling price rises this time due to lack of supply.
> Those farm workers don't even get minimum wages and live like modern day indentured slaves. Give them a FAANG salary and work culture and you will get millions applying
Where will the money for paying those salaries come from?
Of course the problem is the rich class wanting to exploit workers, that's something we know since before Marx, hence why he wrote Das Kapital...
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Or course it's just anecdata and also at this level you can't disentangle the effect of COVID and global inflation from Brexit, but it's not a pretty picture for UK prosperity right now.
British GDP is lower now because of lockdowns. Brexit itself appears to have made no difference. The governments own trade statistics show this clearly.
Also completely incorrect. See the British Chambers of Commerce from April 2023: https://www.britishchambers.org.uk/news/2023/06/uptick-in-ex...
This Omerta on talking about Brexit is ridiculous. As leader of the opposition, why not try representing the opposing views of the population?
The Tories have been so incompetent, unloveable and at times criminal that they've alienated a shocking number of British voters; the polls are predicting a slaughter. So all Labour has to do is... not screw up.
Key voters don’t want to relitigate Brexit. Either they support it in principle (yes, these people still exist), or they fear reopening the blazing rows they had over it, or they’re not ready to admit they were wrong.
To get into a strong position, Labour needed to come out strong on “Brexit is decided” in 2019. Remember that they just lost a catastrophic election on exactly this topic. To tell the public they were all wrong was to guarantee electoral oblivion. They had to come out so strongly, in fact, that it would be decried as a huge U-turn if they did that now. And it would stick.
The EU won’t let the UK join until the Conservative Party are also pro-EU. They don’t want to negotiate reentry only to have the Tories rip us straight back out after they get reelected.
Rejoining takes time in any case. The UK is in an absolute shambles, so Labour have to focus on those immediate improvements if they want to get elected then reelected.
Right now the Brexit debate in the UK is frozen in time. Remainers in particular haven't changed their ideas about it since 2016. If the topic were to be reopened in a big way (e.g. second referendum) then people would become aware of or reminded of many things the establishment would prefer people forget.
For example, this claim by Khan is economic. Remainers generally aren't aware of how badly their economic predictions failed, so continue to believe this kind of claim. But if Starmer were to make a big public position out of trying to undo Brexit, the people who campaigned for it would reawaken and refocus on it (e.g. Farage). They are more popular than Starmer and people listen to them. They would then systematically revisit the claims of the pro-EU establishment and point out how drastically wrong they were about everything. They would imply or outright assert that it was deliberate. And a lot of people - the majority - would agree with them, given what's happened in the years since.
For example, Remainer MPs promised the public there would be a massive recession at the moment of leaving caused by uncertainity. The economy grew instead. You can't be more wrong than that. Then they promised that actually leaving would be chaotic. Most people didn't even notice anything had changed. Then they promised that it would be destructive to trade with the EU, yet trade ratios haven't changed [1]. Then they promised that the UK would be frozen out of international programmes, be "alone" without friends, and sneered at Brexiteer claims that cooperation would continue as being "cakeism". In fact the UK has rejoined the few European programmes it actually wanted, like the Horizon research programme, something that academics and the EU formerly assured Brits would be impossible.
Even the guy who negotiated Brexit for the EU side has adopted Brexiteer positions in the years since.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/sep/26/michel-barnier...
But the politics of Michel Barnier have, it is fair to say, moved on. Tough controls on immigration; a restricted role for European courts and a new politics of patriotism: these are the eyebrow-raising new demands of the EU’s former chief Brexit negotiator.
[...]
“The first chapter of my book is entitled ‘A warning’,” says Barnier, holding up an elegant yellow-jacketed French edition. “People in the bubble of Brussels think they are always right,” he says. “They don’t want to listen. They don’t want to change anything. This is precisely the way to provoke more Brexits elsewhere in Europe. I’m not a federalist. I’ve never been a federalist. I’m a Gaullist and I’m still on the same track – a patriot and a European. And I’m a European in addition to being a patriot and not instead of being a patriot. As the former Brexit negotiator and as a French politician I will draw the lessons of Brexit, OK?”
Remainers are for now happy stewing in their 2016-era bubble where none of this ever happened. Starmer would like to keep them on side, which means keeping them there, which means being very careful about what he does or does not say in public.
[1] https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-... (p15)
Care to explain? EU has big problems, but for any member state, especially the UK this was a jump from the cliff.
The UK might feel it more the last one than other EU countries though. I only went to Leeds and London, but the build quality of non-bourgeois houses is not good, almost US-grade imho (not a dig: you don't need good windows/insulation/coating when you're living in California, you do when you're in the UK). Which is a problem when the house wasn't refitted in 50 years.
It's not ultimately the EU fault, but it failed to uphold the promise of citizen protection and growing together at the same pace. Also, Brexit made EU a lot more resilient and refocused on citizen/consumer protection (despite the "but think of the children" crowd trying its utmost to pass the dumbest laws in the world).
From the perspective of short-lived politicians, something only happens if it happens on your watch.
Everyone is worse off, including the poor who voted for this, but they would have some amount of schadenfreude against the rich who are more worse off as a percentage.
Care to back this claim with data? Not that I doubt it necessarily but I have the opposite impression. The rich tend to not be bound by country lines to get richer and I'm not sure how Brexit would suddenly make that happen.
I mention percentages because on an absolute scale, the ultra wealthy aren't impacted by percentage changes in wealth, the poor are (because they have no buffer).
Brexit has failed for UK, say clear majority of Britons – poll
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38817190
So a made up prediction that he paid for. That's not very convincing given that self-proclaimed economic experts also confidently predicted:
- 500k-800k job losses in an immediate recession following the vote if Leave won
- A loss of trade with the EU upon leaving the single market
... neither of which actually happened. The economy grew after the vote, and today the ratio of EU to non-EU trade the UK engages in hasn't changed from before Brexit, which strongly implies the single market was actually useless for Britain in the end.