Labour Party politics

[Stirlingsays]

Who was your grandfather stroking ?

Stoker.....fecking spelling!

After that he got a job in the print.....Murdoch and technology came for that one as well, but he'd retired by then.

 

[CPFCSaturn]

image

Do you think you could live on £22k a year without financial help?

 

[georgenorman]

Do you think you could live on £22k a year without financial help?

Bloody luxury, when I was a lad ...

 

[Stirlingsays]

The fault doesn't lie with pensioners, it lies with how the economic system has developed since the seventies....money going to money with less agency and resources for joe bloggs.

I'm not sure how that gets easily fixed.....I think you're going to need the massive collapse that they narrowly avoided in 2008 for the kind of dramatic steps required.

Because while I can't stand the neoliberal and left's social policies both the DR and far left are critics of the super-rich's monopoly on international wealth....Amazon, Walmart, Apple, Google, ExxonMobil, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase avoiding taxes compared to their past counterparts......They all do it because they can.

Like I say, I don't think it'll change willingly.....and I'm not looking forward to the proper collapse either....they will do everything they can to avoid it (which of course will make it even worse).

A healthy system would have appropriate taxes on wealthy companies, strong unions (that doesn't mean radical left who ended up destroying the unions), and antitrust laws would mean that corporate wealth would be more balanced with the working class.....but it's not going to happen because they can bugger off elsewhere.

The rich...and people should always have the ability to become rich need a symbiotic relationship with the working class similar to how officers would charge out of the trenches along with their men. When greed and the political classes allow that to change (as they have) then it's a spiral downwards that is dangerous for everybody. In fact I think we have been there for quite a while.

Capitalism is the best system we know....but if crony and not effectively regulated it goes the same way of all systems and feeds on itself until it collapses.

And it won't change until then.

 

[CPFCSaturn]

The fault doesn't lie with pensioners, it lies with how the economic system has developed since the seventies....money going to money with less agency and resources for joe bloggs.

I'm not sure how that gets easily fixed.....I think you're going to need the massive collapse that they narrowly avoided in 2008 for the kind of dramatic steps required.

Because while I can't stand the neoliberal and left's social policies both the DR and far left are critics of the super-rich's monopoly on international wealth....Amazon, Walmart, Apple, Google, ExxonMobil, Bank of America, Citigroup, and JPMorgan Chase avoiding taxes compared to their past counterparts......They all do it because they can.

Like I say, I don't think it'll change willingly.....and I'm not looking forward to the proper collapse either....they will do everything they can to avoid it (which of course will make it even worse).

A healthy system would have appropriate taxes on wealthy companies, strong unions (that doesn't mean radical left who ended up destroying the unions), and antitrust laws would mean that corporate wealth would be more balanced with the working class.....but it's not going to happen because they can bugger off elsewhere.

The rich...and people should always have the ability to become rich need a symbiotic relationship with the working class similar to how officers would charge out of the trenches along with their men. When greed and the political classes allow that to change (as they have) then it's a spiral downwards that is dangerous for everybody. In fact I think we have been there for quite a while.

Capitalism is the best system we know....but if crony and not effectively regulated it goes the same way of all systems and feeds on itself until it collapses.

And it won't change until then.

I agree with much of this, and if it wasn't clear, I certainly don't blame pensioners for where we find ourselves.

I do however think it's very unhelpful when people start to make broad accusations of laziness and entitlement against young people, as we've seen in this thread.

I'm in my 30s and I have no problem accepting that young people now have a worse deal than I had - I went to University before the tuition fees tripled and the interest rates on the loans exploded. I was able to rent a flat with my partner for about £1200 a month (the same flat now costs ~£1800), energy bills and council tax has pretty much doubled since then. A food shop is considerably more expensive now, as are pubs and restaurants.

Does that mean I had it easy or that I'm less proud of managing to buy a house? Certainly not.

 

[Stirlingsays]

I agree with much of this, and if it wasn't clear, I certainly don't blame pensioners for where we find ourselves.

I do however think it's very unhelpful when people start to make broad accusations of laziness and entitlement against young people, as we've seen in this thread.

I'm in my 30s and I have no problem accepting that young people now have a worse deal than I had - I went to University before the tuition fees tripled and the interest rates on the loans exploded. I was able to rent a flat with my partner for about £1200 a month (the same flat now costs ~£1800), energy bills and council tax has pretty much doubled since then. A food shop is considerably more expensive now, as are pubs and restaurants.

Does that mean I had it easy or that I'm less proud of managing to buy a house? Certainly not.

Young people have always been lazier and generally more crap than their older more experienced versions....people should read Churchill's father letters to him as a young man......Let's not forget the parents take some of that responsibility and the parents before them.

Raising kids successfully like getting a home isn't easy either, but some are certainly far worse at doing it than others....and as we know life isn't always fair, bad luck, bad choices and all the rest of it. We all know the sob stories and some of them aren't put on....I know at least three people who's lives were wrecked and I can honesty say it wasn't their fault.

Nevertheless, people grow up in the system that's before them. They see what's successful and desirable within that system and adapt to it to succeed and then for the less bright or fortunate the media further distorts and confuses that picture......selling them what they want to see instead of what they probably need....morally, socially, economically.

If you don't have a family with sensible people in it with skills....you're kinda fecked....Some can pull themselves out of it, most don't.

So you can't divorce the young and some of the negative aspects associated with them from the system that they have before them.

They are...well in many cases....the same genetic material that existed within the generations who made the country great and who remade a lot of the globe in its image.

It's like a football club....if the people at the top aren't up to scratch then it isn't going to work lower down.

 

[HKOwen]

The question is simple, does your degree enable you to earn more then you would without the degree?

Take away the professioanal degrees, medicine, law, engineering etc, take away the sciences and teaching degrees.

Now look at degrees handed out in the Blair and post Blair era. Spurious things like, business studies, social studies etc etc.

People were encouraged to go to university to fill places, proper training in skills would have resulted in many having well paid jobs , instead they have worthless degrees and do end up in lower paid jobs with debt.

Of course they all had a choice

 

[martin2412]

The question is simple, does your degree enable you to earn more then you would without the degree?

Take away the professioanal degrees, medicine, law, engineering etc, take away the sciences and teaching degrees.

Now look at degrees handed out in the Blair and post Blair era. Spurious things like, business studies, social studies etc etc.

People were encouraged to go to university to fill places, proper training in skills would have resulted in many having well paid jobs , instead they have worthless degrees and do end up in lower paid jobs with debt.

Of course they all had a choice

Blair encouraged kids to go to university to get those pointless degrees in order to get them off his jobless figures. He could then turn round and say that he had tackled the high unemployment figures.
The problem was that the kids came out with huge debt, and a degree that was worthless because everyone had one.