Be Excellent To Each Other

Awful wasn't she? Regretting giving her my first pref.

Boris is good on HIGNFY but he's got no business being mayor of London.

Gracious speech from Ken L in defeat, London is the loser.

Having lived in London under both as mayor, I really can't agree.

But aren't you quite well off?

I do OK. But you're making the mistake of thinking that Ken is some hero of the poor. He really isn't. He got in twice on a promise of not raising public transport costs - and both times he did. Guess which sector public transport price rises adversely affect? Poor people. He brought in the congestion charge. Who does that hit hardest? Tradesmen, not bankers. Standardising London taxis so that the now sole supplier has a monopoly and shoved their prices through the roof? Again, not punishing rich people there.

Boris may be a Tory, and a bumbling fool, but he has made commitments and kept them - replace the bendybus with the routemaster, introducing cycle hire schemes, etc.

It does seem around here that if you don't like Labour you're seen as an Evil Tory.

Fair enough, I shouldn't really get involved as I haven't been to London for about 18 years and I'd be quite happy if I never set foot in it again.

But, y'know, Labour vs Tory, class warfare innit.

As someone from London who is not well off and who has lived there during both Ken and Boris's stints as mayor, I'd choose Boris any day. Absolutely with The Ginger Love Monkey on this one.

Frankly, he should get to be mayor forever because of this.

Until he finally decided to go the whole hog and just become a crime-fighting hero, of course.

And he could go up against the man with rock skin: Living-Stone! The evil mastermind who took two London buses and smashed them together to make one big rubbish bus!

That would be ace.

Ah, someone mentions bendy buses. That took longer than I anticipated, my drink has become quite warm. Who's going to mention the M4 bus lane for full Clarkson points?

That's ironic.

Like a bendy bus on the M4. Full of spoons.

A no smoking sign on the new Routemasters.

I live close to London and I was very surprised when Boris won the first time.

He comes across as such a clown, but he has done a good job and stuck to many of his promises. Even though he is not my mayor so speak he has gone up in my estimation

The close run call he had will be down to protest votes from people who don't like the Tory cuts.

Oh yes and also from London people who think they have a god given right to sit on the dole in a house costing £1000 a week.

Woah there Craster!

Brodie has put up public transport costs MUCH more than Ken ever did. In his one term he's almost doubled bus fares! So on public transport costs, Ken wins.

On Routemasters, they're a horrific money sink. Maybe popular but at the moment they cost well over a million pounds EACH. It's inefficient and a lot of money to spend in something because it looks nicer.

On the bikes, they were planned by Livingstone (based on Lynne Featherstone's plan) and Boris simply didn't cancel the existing plans. Hardly something to take massive credit for. They're also run terribly at present, and are a massive net loss and advertise Barclays everywhere for a pittance.

Boris also spent 64 million pounds on building extra access to Shepherd's Bush tube station. Apart from it didn't work so they concreted it in. 64 million pounds wasted with no result.

I am far from being a leftist, and ddn't vote for Ken, but he was a far, far better mayor in terms of public transport. It's not even close.

The decision on shepherds bush must have been per boris. I was last there over 3 years ago and they were working on it.

I was talking about keeping promises, rather than anything else. Unlike Ken, Boris never pledged that he wouldn't raise fares.

And I want to ride around town on a million pound bus.

Like his promise that there would be no strikes on the tube, followed by a rise in strike numbers? Or a promise that the bikes would be on budget but went 125 million over (hence the rises in fares, which he promised wouldn't be affected by this).

His PR though, that's phenomenal.

Heh, I'm not getting involved in all of this - yet again - but fuck me, the sheer, sick-making hypocrisy of Labour and many of their supporters is breathtaking in the extreme.

Don't talk to me about the supposed "evil" of the Liberal Democrats or Tories, when Labour itself is veritably dripping in the blood of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children, what with their blatent, attendant lies to the British people. Not to mention the pure, undiluted economic ineptitude that is the real reason for job losses that people are bemoaning here; a total failure to regulate the banks, personal credit, property boom, decimation of industry far worse, and much faster than under the Tories or anyone else, the burgeoning of public sector spending (on borrowed cash), selling half the gold reserve at the bottom of the market... it goes on. Oh, and as for cuts, I must've imagined Alistair Darling talking about the need of draconian cuts "worse than those under Thatcher" (after the last Labour administration left the country bankrupt), right? Still, no doubt these cuts are only because of the "evil" LDs and Tories.

If a doctor administers life-saving chemotherapy, to cure cancer, with awful side effects and symptoms, that makes him "evil", right? Never mind the carginogen that caused the disease in the first place, oh no.

No, the Conservatives have made many terrible mistakes in the recent past, I'm happy to concede, but they have never reduced this country to the economic rubble and cultural wasteland upon which we all find ourselves. Never has the gap between rich and poor been so great; never has the state of our industries been so parlous; never has our standing within the world community - economic, political and moral - been so low; never have the prospects of our young people been so desperate (youth unemployment hit new records pre-recession and the standards of their education hit the floor); never have the country's coffers been so empty. The greatest political and economic legacy this country has known in recent history not only wasted, but positively and disastrously annihilated. My 2-year old grandson could've made a (much) better fist of it.

Labour the party of the working man/woman..? <spits> Given all of the above, I frankly find it hard to understand how any sane person could ever trust Labour to even so much as put the kettle on without incident, ever again, let alone run the country (less still trumpeting how fucking wonderful they are). Regardless of wherever this battered nation will find itself on the scrapheap of failed, declined nations in years to come, and all the genuine suffering and deprivation that people cannot even concieve of at present, the names of Blair and Brown will live on in infamy among the British people, far more so than the likes of Chamberlain or MacDonald. And don't even start with the moral authority argument, because this rings more hollow than the fucking supermassive black hole at the centre of our Milky Way.

Not that I'm going to defend Labours record too much, but the IMF figures put the reason for the large public debt as the loss of output in the crash and not public sector spending.

http://touchstoneblog.org.uk/2011/10/19040/

The socialist agenda following IMF? Honestly, anyone with an ounce of common sense can see that bliar and broon are responsible for everything that's currently wrong with this country, unemployment, the riots, return to the the three day week, tuberculosis, the disappearance of Madeleine McCann, and the increasingly low amount of orange revels.




Sorry, came over a bit BBC blog comments there.

Seriously, what record is there to defend, though?
Given the start point of 1997 and the end point of 2010, what is there to be said? Labour's record is, according to any fair-minded assessment, utterly woeful. There simply is no other conclusion that can be drawn.



Reduced "output" from what, exactly? The so called "invisible earnings" from the banks/financial sector...? Hah! "Invisible" is about right. It's pretty clear these so-called "profits" were anything but, and hadn't been for years, due to a total and catastrophic lack of effective regulation (borne of a lack of knowledge combined with totally unjustified and unfounded arrogance, of course) - the job of government.

As for real, genuine economic output beyond Labour's aforestated Monopoly money economics, very little remained of our manufacturing industries (it is an incontrovertible fact that more of these were lost, by proportion to GDP under Labour, in much less time than for the preceding Tory govt., and unlike the latter, many of these were good, lean industries having had the benefit of genuine prior investment, unhobbled via the removal of ludicrous Union legislation etc.). About the only things still being 'made' by this time were houses and other property, off the back of a quite deliberate govt/BOE credit-fuelled property boom/bubble. A "loss of output" upon the bursting of said credit bubble - the removal of the moon-money funds - is hardly surprising, then, and most certainly does not render the Labour government of the day beyond blame or criticism in this respect, either - quite the reverse. This was, after all, a six year duration (minimum) slow-motion train crash in the making, that I and many others foresaw, despite it supposedly being "unforeseeable". (Some interesting stuff here about the BoE's pension fund investments from 2006 onwards, for anyone who's interested http://order-order.com/2009/03/31/bank- ... inflation/)

Of course, not running a huge deficit in every single tax year in govt. would have helped matters also; Brown's proverbial "not fixing the roof for a rainy day", that most understated political cliche. But of course, if you remember, Labour had singlehandedly put an end to the scourge of the Economic Cycle, so no worries there. Just as they had fixed Afghanistan and Iraq...

It is also surely abundantly clear that increased per capita public sector spending has occurred under Labour, and that a much higher proportion of the working population is, or was, employed either directly by it, or on a de facto basis (i.e. within jobs that wholly depended upon the public sector). Whereas this may (arguably) have been affordable in the short term, off the back of said banking/financial sector pretend-profit Corporation Tax takings, abundant, cheap money and credit-boom fuelled consumer economy (despite still running a deficit in successive budgets, even during times such as these, the whole "five golden rules" bullshit or whatever it was), it clearly was not economically viable in the medium or long term. Hence all Vince Cable's words about the need of a diverse economy with genuine wealth creation, not something that the public sector is capable of doing. (Greece, of course, is or at least was the ultimate embodiment of a public sector economy). For this, it is again surely culpable; short term, fleeting claims of "full employment" (even though demonstrably wholly untrue), as against a serious contributor to economic meltdown and the decline of the United Kingdom. For me, any gross over-reliance upon the public sector to provide employment, more than any other indicator, is surely *the* telltale sign of a failed economic policy for a State/government.

APOD mocks and parodies those who criticise Labour on political blogs or whatever, probably myself included, no doubt. Hey, I guess it is so very tiring for people like him to hear the ordinary, rank and file pissed off "little people" who may not share the supposed great eloquence and/or gifted intellect of some others , but who rail against the lies and the Doublethink bullshit peddled by those of the Political Class nonetheless. A Political Class who are so laughably disconnected and isolated from those they disingenuously claim to represent, less still understand, none moreso than the Labour Party - not to mention the very short fucking memories of their supporters, some of whom must surely have had glue in their eyes for the last five or more years.

Me? I'll take their typo-ridden yet earnest angst over bovine herd apathy, or worse still, the outmoded, ideologically-driven garbage of those who claim to represent and/or be of the working classes, yet wouldn't know a good, honest hard days' work if it slapped them squarely between the eyes.

We will soon see how seriously the left take their responsibilities in both Greece and France.

I suspect that despite all the noise about not sticking to austerity terms both countries will do as they are told. Greece has no choice and France needs all the euro hand outs to keep running.

Failing that it will give Germany a reason to invade again

Hmm. Well, I'd have to say that the early omens are not good on that score:



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-17986065

... So then, "Greece in Welching on the Deal Shocker"...? Some very pissed off Germans likely to be ahoy very soon.

Still, I daresay the pound will be worth a fair bit more in British holiday makers' pockets this summer. (Well, at least until the whole Euro project implodes, which it will, quite probably smashing the EU itself into a million pieces as it does so. Who'd of thunk the Euro was a ridiculous, unworkable-in-the-long-term, doomed-to-catastrophic-failure project, eh? Those pesky, "nasty" Eurosceptic Tories, eh? Still, I'm sure it'll be lauded as just another one of those "unforseeable" outcomes regardless, I've no doubt!)

/cue music
Bom, bom, bom
There may be trouble a-hea-d...
But while there's music and moonlight and love and romance
Let's face the music and dance

Before the fiddlers have fled
Before they ask us to pay the bill and while we still have the chance
Let's face the music and dance

Soon we'll be without the moon, humming a different tune and then
There may be teardrops to shed
So while there's moonlight and music and love and romance
Let's face the music and dance

God knows who'll lend Greece any cash if they go back on the EU deal. They'll find it very hard to pay the next set of bills that come due.

I think Greece will be doing the right thing if it tells the rest of the Eurozone to fuck off and whistle for their money.

They need to get back to their own currency, devalue massively, and start again from there.

If Germany wanted to rule Europe they should have won the war. (Either of them.) Merkel's economic warfare is being rejected by the electorates, and that is an entirely good thing.

I'm ambivalent on this one.

On the one hand, y'know, Greece (or at least, the Greek government) did borrow the money in the first place, they did con their way into the Eurozone, and they did spend piss away said monies on self evidently unsustainable things that they simply could not afford. It didn't exactly help matters that they apparently weren't too hot on the tax collection front either.

So, you could say they've got it coming, and it's only right that they have to pay back what they've borrowed (except that already isn't going to happen anyway, what with the 50% "haircut" imposed on creditors). I mean, if governments don't pay back their debts, where does this leave the world economy? We've already seen what happens when banks don't trust each other, yet this would be a pip squeak by comparison to the Euro failing.

On the other hand, the banks lent them the money, and I'm betting they were just a tad too focused on self congratulatory bonuses and fine looking balance sheets and too little on basic banking practices and due diligence, all based on the apparent presumption (and greed/stupidity) that no matter how broken and/or with little or even no collateral, it is an impossibility for an EU State within the Eurozone to default, that Germany (or who/whatever) was somehow a guarantor? (If they even thought about it at all?)

So you could say the banks had it coming to 'em as well. Trouble is though, those banks were lending our pension funds and savings...



True enough, albeit the fall-out from this, and moreover the default of much larger economies like Spain (25% unemployment and rising - simply unsustainable) will be truly apocalyptic. People think they've seen austerity now..?

Actually, I'm inclined to think that the Greeks won't have done too badly from this, in a way. I mean, they've enjoyed a standard of living, social benefits package and new infrastructure for many years, the like of which they could never have afforded if they'd stayed out of the Euro? They can't repay and they will reap the whirlwind, but will this be so much worse than if they'd stayed out of the Euro from the off? It still would've crashed, just a bit later perhaps, and they would've been far from immune from the fallout even in that case? Debatable IMO.



You can't really blame them? From a German POV, they have worked and saved hard, invested in their industries, educated their people and IIRC had their own austerity drive some years back, to ensure wages - and hence products - were competitive, whilst other EU states like Greece took the piss. Why should they have to pay vast, vast sums just to keep these countries and their people, in the lifestyle in which they've become accustomed?

The counterpoint is, of course, that Germany has reaped the benefit of a relatively weak currency, precisely due to the aforesaid profligacy and all-round uselessness of these fellow states, handily also providing a ready-made customer base for their products. Had Germany stayed with the D-Mark, it would've soared through the roof as compared to the likes of the Drachma, Lire and even the Franc, rendering German manufactured goods unaffordably expensive.

This doesn't seem to be acknowledged though, unsurprisingly.

Excellent post there Cavey and TBH very little I'd take issue with.

No one comes out of this looking good, of course. The tragedy is however, that it's the people of these countries who are ultimately going to pay the price.

The bankers escaped with their billions years ago, and the politicians are all sitting pretty. The burden of bad debt has been shifted onto national banks (i.e. the taxpayer) - as I understand it Spanish and Italian banks are now the major purchasers of their government's bonds via loans from the ECB, which seems incredible - and of course the lender of last resort as we have already seen is the taxpayer.

The whole thing represents an incalculable transfer of wealth from the less wealthy to the mega-wealthy, who are now even richer than they were before.

It will take nothing less than a revolution at the ballot boxes to start to fix this, governments that have the courage to effectively tell the banks to fuck off. The transition will be painful but ultimately it'll be better than countries being run by the banks, for the banks - with compliant politicians greasing the wheels along the way.

I think that's not far from the truth. There's some excellent Planet Money episodes that cover this in detail.

The same is true of Britain, of course.

Something that came home to me from the Planet Money episodes I listened to was that huge amounts of the Greek debt is personal, not govermental. People were taking out ridiculous mortgages, business development loans that made no sense, massive credit card lending, income tax fraud on a huge scale, and so forth. If you're suggesting the average Greek in the street was duped into this by his or her government, I think that's inaccurate.

Meanwhile, 7% of votes in the Greek election went to the Golden Dawn, a far-right party that (in a BNP-style move) has recently carefully rebranded itself as a protest vote for the common man and stopped suggesting too loudly things like using landmines to protect the Greek borders.

This is the party flag:



Yes, really.

I don't fully agree with that, Doc. Greece is an intrinsically much poorer State, with a vastly smaller economy than the UK's. So, I guess the positive skewing effect of their Euro membership in the "good years" was far, far greater than it would've been for us? The size of loans required for the UK to more or less forget about collecting taxes, having final salary State pensions from 50 onwards or whatever it was, and a public sector of a relative, per capita size that makes even our home-grown one look positively streamlined - all multiplied by orders of magnitude to account for our much larger population, inherently higher genuine economic output starting point and so on - could never have been realised in practice.

I'm not saying we wouldn't have felt *some* benefits at this time, but I suggest to you that they would have been nowhere near as pronounced (or ludicrous, depending on your POV) than as was the case with Greece. After all, they still collected taxes in comparable-sized failing, profligate economies like Spain, Italy and France, and people not much older than myself don't retire on huge State pensions in those countries, either.

And of course, the *disbenefits* had we been in the Eurozone are now all too painfully evident even now, let alone still further down that particular road to ruination.

Well, History repeats itself, doesn't it, even though we choose to ignore this uncomfortable truth again and again, due to a combination of hubris, failing collective memory of the recent past, vanity, stupidity and false confidence in our new-found standards of human civilisation? (Oh, but the latter's mere molecules-deep veneer so easily strips away, when circumstances arise).

*reads ensuing page*

Quite

Actually, I was referring to the age-old Labour political debate. Granted, I did respond further to this specifically (once, to Plis' post), but the conversation has quickly moved on to other things, with numerous, politically diverse members taking part, myself included.

But anyway, this is a public discussion forum and it's a political thread, started by someone other than you, who hasn't raised any objection? If Trooper thought I was derailing or otherwise messing up his thread then I'd listen, but in your case, especially in the light of the totally pointless troll post you've just made, I can quite cheerfully confirm that I'm sorry, but I couldn't care less.

If you don't like my posts, stick me on ignore - don't troll the threads that I'm posting in? Simple.

I didn't raise an objection.

Sorry if I've somehow misunderstood what you were trying to say, throughsilver.
It seemed fairly clear to me that you seemed to be just taking the piss that I'd continued partaking in this discussion at all.

Don't be worried. It was kind of funny that you said you were keeping away, and.... didn't.

Anyway, tonight has seen a Beex first. A political conversation which has aligned CC, AE, DG and APOD in their views with no real difference of opinion. Scary times for Euroland indeed.

Well, yes. Fair enough I guess. Not for the first time either.
Oh well, leopards and spots, hey.



Indeed, I can't recall that ever happening previously either, though I wish the circumstances were happier.

I guess the writing truly is on the wall now.

Fuck off to hugsandkisses.com where your sort are tolerated.

Hah, don't worry -- Cavey and AE said things I disagreed with, but I lack the time for a debate so I skated over that and selectively quoted some stuff I agreed with / could elaborate on. Crisis averted!

Who are you and what have you done with Gaywood?

We don't have a generic "Euro economy" thread, do we?

Anyway, this is interesting.





No idea how credible this JP Morgan analyst bloke is, or which way his bias (or his employer's bias) might run. The same guy did this; I can't decide if that's genius or just stupid.

What has to be remembered is that the Euro was always a political project rather than an economic one - giving up the Deutschmark was the price France was wanting to exact from Germany in exchange for allowing German unification, so the new Germany would be locked into Europe.

It's also arguable that locking countries' economies together in the Eurozone will create a demand for deeper political union, although I doubt very much that any EU country currently wants the stress and popular opposition that yet another treaty to move towards federalisation would require.

Doesn't surprise me in the least to be honest, and it's not as though there wasn't a whole chorus of people saying it before, during and after the formation of the Euro, especially in the light of the ERM fiasco (and any number of failed historical currency unions/alignments before that). The Euro, as conceived (most especially without full political union - impossible of course), was never going to work, even without the Greeks' antics. (But of course, even any suggestion of such things and you were instantly derided as "anti Europe", or "wanting Britain to be at the sidelines of the EU" or whatever, by the likes of the Lib Dems and many others).

Still, the sheer, unbridled vanity, arrogance, naivety and all round wet-behind-the-ears fiscal ineptitude of the architects of the Euro won through, convinced as they presumably were of their place in history. Well, they got the last bit right at least.

The EEC wasn't perfect, but CAP aside, was at least functional as a fairly loose free market trading zone of independent States with their own free-floating currencies. Just look at it now.

Happy Europe Day Cavey!



I think the lack of borders across the continent, the single market, and the ability to work, travel, and live anywhere in the EU is one of the greatest political achievements of the last few decades. All that, of course, doesn't require the deep political or economic union that some want, but it would be a bad day for every European country if those gains were lost due to anger about the EU or the euro.

'Nice' to see North Carolina vote to enshrine into its constitution a level of bigotry that not only outlaws gay marriage, but also all same sex civil unions.

Also, in Indiana, a Republican has been unseated for not being Conservative enough (maybe he once shook hands with a gay man and now he's infected) and replaced with a Tea Party sponsored bloke.

Oh dear, America. It's amazing how the right wing over there decry fundamentalist states in the Middle East whilst simultaneously trying to impose it in their own country.

There is not enough facepalm in the world for these psychos.

That was a primary, wasn't it? Rather than the seat actually changing hands? I thought it was basically the case that when the seat went up for election shortly, the Republican candidate will be Johnny Nutbar instead of Steve the Semi-sane, but that there's still a chance that the Dem candidate would take the seat instead.

Yeah, it was.

Still just makes me equal parts angry and sad.

Americans are 200 years behind socially acceptable behaviours, but they'll catch up one day. It isn't their fault.

It's incredible, isn't it?

The last time NC amended its state constitution marriage clause, it was to ban interracial marriage.



(https://twitter.com/#!/thinkprogress/st ... 16/photo/1)

Oh, how times have changed.



(https://twitter.com/#!/ScottNevins/stat ... 01/photo/1)

Still, at least gay marriage is still legal in hippy left-wing places like Californ--- HEY WAIT A MINUTE.

Oh, is that what happened? Sigh. Danielle hated Indiana, the entire state is almost wall-to-wall nutbars.