British Politics

Starmer and his ilk will struggle until they realise that calling, or at least implying that anyone that disagrees with them is a thick racist bigot is not a vote winner.

 

Funnily enough, everytime you post on here...

 

A rapscalion

 

Pete's known as "Tawt Taf" in Mitcham ... he thinks they have mistaken him for a rather uptight Welshman.

 

Funny you say that as well.

Mind you we laugh at you

 

Another cracking word

 

Forget war with Russia
Boris had a birthday cake!

 

https://gettr.com/post/pr1dmw5be4

 

Time waits for no man.

 

And no man is an island. *

*Disregard the Isle of Man

 

Isle of Men too

 

The guy that drove into the black stabber is called Mr Ibrahim.

 

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EMMA DUNCAN
Sadly, our economy isn’t booming after all

Labour market and exports of services are thriving but wider claims on growth are exaggerated
Emma Duncan

Thursday January 27 2022, 9.00pm, The Times
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I don't normally blow my own trumpet but I am a world-beating tech worker. Since yesterday, when I discovered the button that says “add Google Meet video conferencing” to diary appointments, my ability to schedule face-to-face online meetings with high-level global executives has risen by infinity per cent.

Beat that, software developers of San Francisco and Singapore! I am so excited by my newly acquired competence that I am setting up video meetings with people all over the world who would be quite happy to do without me leering out of the screen at them.

If you’re inclined to pour cold water on my assessment of my performance, I would point out that it’s about as valid as Boris Johnson’s assertion that Britain’s economy is the fastest growing in the G7. His claim is true, if you look at 12 months of the most recently available data, but it’s hardly surprising. Having shrunk more than any economy except Japan’s in the early stages of the pandemic, ours had more ground to make up. The greater the height from which you drop a ball, the higher the bounce.

If you look at the pandemic as a whole, we have nothing to boast about. Our economy has shrunk more than that of any G7 country bar Japan. The Economist ranked our pandemic record 22nd out of 23 countries, measured by growth, debt, household income, share prices and investment. Nor has that stellar annual performance been sustained. In the most recent quarterly data, Britain has fallen back to fifth place. Only in that brief, glorious window, from October 2020 to September 2021, did the numbers justify the story that the prime minister wanted to tell.

As every journalist — including the prime minister — knows, the story is all in the framing. “If you want a happy ending,” said Orson Welles, “that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” You could write a heartwarming tale of a shy country girl who struggles to find her feet in the big city until a prince sweeps her off her feet, or a tragic one about a girl who marries a prince, discovers that he is in love with somebody else and dies.


Similarly, careful selection of timeframe allows you to tell an encouraging story about almost any country’s economy. Even Italy, for goodness sake, is doing well now: it came second in the G7 in the past quarter, just behind France.

Given the volatility of recent economic data, what’s happened during the pandemic tells us very little about our economy’s underlying performance. It’s the longer term that shows how we’re really doing, and that story is not particularly encouraging. We did badly during the 1970s and fairly well, largely thanks to Margaret Thatcher’s reforms, from the early 1980s to the early 2000s. Since then things have been a bit dismal.

You can massage the figures a bit by picking the right measure: because our population is increasing, our economy has grown faster than our GDP per head, though the latter is a better measure of prosperity. Another trick to looking good is to keep company with those less attractive than yourself. That means steering clear of America (out of our league) and avoiding direct comparison with northern Europeans (annoyingly successful) and eastern Europeans (growing fast from a low base).

The EU average, dragged down by southerners, is reasonably flattering. But however much you polish the figures, it’s a struggle to make our long-term economic performance shine. The best claim I can make is that our GDP grew faster than the EU’s in the decade before the pandemic. (Over the five years before the pandemic, we did worse; per head, we did worse.)



A more constructive way of looking at our performance is to narrow the focus to see what’s actually going well. Our labour market is in genuinely good shape. It’s not just that there’s lots of demand for workers at the moment. That’s true everywhere. It’s also that we have a remarkably high labour force participation rate — the proportion of our people in work or looking for it. We’re sixth in the world, behind Angola (can’t trust the numbers), Iceland (too small to count), Slovakia (who knew?) and Germany and Switzerland (annoyingly successful Europeans).

The other economic achievement of which we can boast is our success in exporting services. That’s everything we sell to foreigners that you can’t touch — banking, music, education, tech, accounting, insurance, legal services and much more. We’re second in the world after the United States; in relation to the size of our economy, we do four times better than America does.

You wouldn’t know it, however, because it’s not the story that the politicians want to tell. As Duncan Weldon, author of Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through, a gripping tale of Britain’s economic fortunes, points out, “we’re genuinely good at exporting services, but the politicians are obsessed with bashing metal”. And with fish: during trade deal talks with the EU, the government obsessed over fishing (0.03 per cent of the economy), ignored financial services (9 per cent) and failed to get a deal for visa-free work travel for professionals.

Instead of lambasting lawyers, belittling bankers and distorting data, politicians should be identifying the sources of our success and building on them by giving people the skills needed to work in those areas and helping them to sell their services in other countries.

Some hope. The idea that the government might focus on our long-term prosperity, rather than parties, wallpaper and its short-term survival, feels almost absurdly naive.

 

Met Police blocks parts of Sue Gray report into No 10 parties
Sue Gray weighs up whether to publish as force investigates


Kieran Andrews, Scottish Political Editor | Steven Swinford, Political Editor | George Grylls, Political Reporter
Friday January 28 2022, 11.30am, The Times

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The Metropolitan Police denied that it was trying to delay publication of Sue Gray’s report into parties at Downing Street
ROB PINNEY/GETTY IMAGES

Keir Starmer accused Boris Johnson of using the Metropolitan Police as a “shield” as it emerged that Sue Gray could delay publishing her report on Downing Street lockdown parties.

The senior civil servant is weighing up whether to delay the release until police investigations have concluded. Scotland Yard this morning told her not to release key parts in case it prejudiced a criminal investigation. Gray may also choose to hand it over to the prime minister for publication in a limited form.

Holding the report until after the police investigation might mean it not being seen for months. However, redacting details about Downing Street parties would be at odds with the fundamental remit of her investigation.

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Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader, accused Boris Johnson of using the Met as a “shield” to protect his position in No 10.

Starmer said that he wanted Gray’s report to be published as soon as possible but conceded that the police inquiry complicated the issue.



He told The Times: “The prime minister is spending all this time arguing about whether this report should be redacted or not in relation to criminal proceedings into his breach of the laws.

“He’s also using both Sue Gray and the police as a shield. You don’t need Sue Gray, a senior civil servant, or the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to tell you whether you went to a party.

“You know whether you went and this game that the prime minister is playing where he won’t say until somebody tells him what he tells them is frankly ridiculous. But I think the big ticket item here is the paralysis of our politics caused by a criminal investigation brought about because of the activities of the prime minister.”


Scotland Yard has said that Sue Gray’s report should make “minimal reference” to the events it is investigating.

The intervention by the Metropolitan Police appeared to grant the prime minister a reprieve after two senior Conservative backbenchers said yesterday that the report must be published in full.

The Met said: “For the events the Met is investigating, we asked for minimal reference to be made in the Cabinet Office repor

“The Met did not ask for any limitations on other events in the report, or for the report to be delayed, but we have had ongoing contact with the Cabinet Office, including on the content of the report, to avoid any prejudice to our investigation.”

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Scotland Yard said Gray’s report should make “minimal reference” to the events it is investigating
PA
Dame Cressida Dick, the Met commissioner, launched a police investigation into Downing Street and Whitehall parties on Tuesday after Gray submitted details of potential criminal wrongdoing.

Adam Wagner, a barrister and expert on coronavirus regulations, questioned how the full publication of Gray’s report could prejudice the police inquiry.

“How would a factual civil service report about events the police is investigating ‘prejudice’ their investigation?” he asked.

• Sue Gray report flowchart: What could her findings mean for the PM?

“It is absolutely normal for concerns to be raised about prejudice to a criminal trial. That is due to a concern that the jury will be influenced by press coverage and not be sufficiently objective.

“But the police don’t, as far as I am aware, ask journalists not to report on ongoing ‘investigations’ and often media will report on the factual circumstances surrounding a police investigation, then clam up once a charge has been brought.”

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Theresa May has sharply criticised the government for its handling of Downing Street parties and warned Johnson that “nobody is above the law”.

In a scathing intervention, the former prime minister said that she had been left “angry” by the revelations of No 10 aides partying during lockdown.

In a letter to her constituents obtained by the Maidenhead Advertiser, May’s local paper, she said: “I have said previously that it is vital that those who set the rules follow the rules. Nobody is above the law.

“Like so many, I was angry to hear stories of those in Number 10, who are responsible for setting the coronavirus rules, not properly following the rules.

“Sue Gray is still investigating these matters and is due to publish her report in the coming days. When the report’s findings are published if there is evidence of deliberate or premeditated wrongdoing, I expect full accountability to follow.

“All those working at the heart of government should conduct themselves with the highest of standards which befits the work they do, and this applies as much to those working in Number 10 as to other parts of government.”